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

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

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

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he’s Frank and in Chicago he’s Ernest.

Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there’s old luggage, a couple of bikes. It’s big enough to put one minivan in. That’s it. No dartboard. I’m so not macho.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

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

I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people.

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier… I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.

I’m not denyin‘ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ‚em to match the men.

I’ve got a great sense of humor.

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

A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

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.

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

The other day I… uh, no, that wasn’t me.

The gods too are fond of a joke.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

It’s a funny old world.

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

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.

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.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

Joe Frazier is so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the back of his head.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

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.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

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.‘

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I’m comfortable in my own skin, no matter how far it’s stretched. Ha ha.

I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

It’s funny; recently I’ve started to notice people’s impersonations of me, and it’s basically like a hyperactive child.

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.

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.

A lot of critics object to what I do, but I got into comedy to make people laugh, and I’ve always worked hard.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

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

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

I do all my own stunts. I’m kidding.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‚Present‘ or ‚Not guilty.‘

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

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

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.