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

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

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.

If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?

This has been my life for many years; one role feeds the other.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I have no problem yelling at anybody’s kid – free of charge!

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.

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

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

My success comes in making fun of whatever you’re doing. That’s my way.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

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

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.

I grew up in a funny way.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Stand-up is my baby.

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

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

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

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‚Yes,‘ you know he is a crook.

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

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.

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

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

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.

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

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

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.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

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

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

I sing and play the guitar, and I’m a walking, talking bacterial infection.

You’re not going to see my sense of humor on the football field. That’s not a place for me to joke around.

If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.