I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

My neighbor has a circular driveway… he can’t get out.

Since the very beginning, Emeril’s had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

What’s with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

All those who believe in psychokinesis – raise my hand.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can’t predict what people will laugh at.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I’ve always had to conquer fear when I’m on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It’s absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I’m okay. It’s like I’m out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

The right honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

We must laugh at man to avoid crying for him.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can’t bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

Sometimes I wish my first word was ‚quote,‘ so that on my death bed, my last words could be ‚end quote.‘

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‚Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?‘ I said: ‚Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.‘

Writing music is just like writing a book.

She laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

In the end, everything is a gag.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

My doctor told me I shouldn’t work out until I’m in better shape. I told him, ‚All right; don’t send me a bill until I pay you.‘

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

‚Nation‘ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‚See if you can blow this out.‘

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.