I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

I’m proud to be an actor. See, as an actor, you live longer. Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

You think I’m going to ask these sweet 14 year olds to ask their parents to buy a $100 ticket then run around in latex and lip sync? No way.

I now have two different audiences. There’s the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.

I’ve enjoyed all the parts of my career.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

I like George Carlin’s jokes. I like his humor. He’s one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

In Hollywood you can see things at night that are fast enough to be in the Olympics in the day time.

Diana Ross is a big inspiration to all of us. We all grew up watching everything about her – her mike placement, her grace, her style and her class.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

TV’s a big deal in prison. A big deal. People watch it nonstop.

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.

If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?

Every time I try to retire, or even think of retiring from acting, my agent comes up with a script.

My old drama coach used to say, ‚Don’t just do something, stand there.‘ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.

And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it’s not you going through it.

Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it’s dangerous.

I love Steve Carell.

When I got into this, I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me, I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

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.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

If you tell me there’s something I can’t do, I’ll want to do it even more. Especially when it comes to entertaining.

I think the family movie is very important to everybody right now.

I’ve always wanted to do a family movie.

Throughout my career, I learned plenty about war on the battlefield, but I learned even more about the importance of finding peace. And that is what the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. do: prevent the wars that we can avoid so that we fight only the ones we must.

We don’t want people to leave the stadium until the game finishes.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

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

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

I sell escapism.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I love to pop up at the movie theaters. I love to treat the people who are there.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

When you come to my show, I want it to feel like opera, like a theatre.

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

Chris Rock does the political thing really well, but that never worked for me.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

People get a kick out of my stupidity.

You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Stand-up comedy is mine: it’s my entity; it’s my brand; I own it. I do it when I want to do it.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

‚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.

I did 20 years in the Navy. I joined the Navy right out of high school and went through Navy boot camp, went to SEAL training, got done with that, and then showed up at a SEAL team, where I did 20 years. That was pretty much my whole adult life.

I learned how important it is to entertain people and give them a reason to come and watch you play.

I’d love to go into WWE and have a real knock and see what’s what.