Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

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

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

I often joke that 100 years from now I hope people are saying, ‚Dang, she looks good for her age!‘

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

My husband calls me ‚catfish.‘ He says I’m all mouth and no brains.

I don’t think comedy will ever die.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

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

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

I laugh and joke, but I don’t get distracted very easily.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

For me, it’s a purity thing about the joke itself. It’s a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that’s a legitimate item you have there. For me, it’s nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It’s just not what I’m in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

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

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.

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

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‚What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!‘

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

There’s nothing like white trash at the White House.

I love nerdy, cute, quirky boys who don’t take themselves too seriously.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

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.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

I didn’t start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born – I started getting wicked BO. You know there’s a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.

The funny thing is people won’t let me pay for things. I’ll be in a restaurant and the manager will say, ‚Oh no, it’s on the house.‘

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‚Where’s the self-help section?‘ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

When I’m home, I spend Sunday with my husband. If we’re not cooking, we travel around in our camper, stop at fast-food restaurants, and picnic. We love that stuff that will harden your arteries in a hurry.

In the end, everything is a gag.

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

I’ve got a great sense of humor.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

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

I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.

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

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.