An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.

That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

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.‘

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

God doesn’t dwell in the wooden, stony or earthen idols. His abode is in our feelings, our thoughts.

When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.

I’m a big believer than a great bit is a great bit – if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they’re beautiful things when they’re done.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

You’ll never have any trouble with Mr. T, I’m just a big, calm teddy bear kind of guy. Mr. T ain’t ashamed to cry. When I go out and I meet people who are suffering and they come and talk to me, Mr. T cries, Mr. T who could break a man’s jaw with his fist.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

It is impossible for you to be angry and laugh at the same time. Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive and you have the power to choose either.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

I think women love very hard. We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes, I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.

Frazier is so ugly that he should donate his face to the U.S. Bureau of Wild Life.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

No, I’m not anguished and tormented.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

I was always making my friends laugh, but I never wanted the attention of the whole classroom.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

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

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

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

An unemployed court jester is nobody’s fool.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.