I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Stand-up is my baby.

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

I hate to be smart.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

I have a garden in my backyard that’s completely organic, which I’m very proud of.

I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him ‚father.‘

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

Contrary to reports, this boy is not a billionaire or going to be richer than any Beatle… and not just in the sense of money, by the way; the Beatles are untouchable – those billionaire reports are a joke.

The only way I’d be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.

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.‘

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

I look just like the girls next door… if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.

If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

Humor is reason gone mad.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.

There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

Almost anything can be funny if said the right way – but it has to be said the right way.

We’re a phenomenally snobby society, and it’s such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.

I mean, families are weird.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

So many guys are so conservative with their hair, and I always joke with all my buddies when they mess with me, and I’ll say, ‚That’s right, keep the same haircut for ten years.‘ How fun is that?

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

I’m so old, I don’t buy green bananas any more.

An unemployed court jester is nobody’s fool.

There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose.

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

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.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

When I was with Andy Warhol, I thought, ‚God, his wig looks cheaper than mine!‘