I learned from the guys before me – Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, just to name a few. These are guys that let it all hang out. What they lived is what they took to the stage.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

My comedy is different every time I do it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

I like to work with artists from around the world. There are so many new inspiring filmmakers.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

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.

I never dreamt, in my dream, I’m Dalai Lama.

A lot of my heartbreak songs are inspired by things my sisters are going through, or friends.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

When I do stand-up shows at colleges, girls will talk to me after the show, and that always feels good. I like talking to them.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

Where the mind goes, the man follows.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

I have a message to give to the world, and I shall not be thwarted.

Having other comedians complimenting my work is the biggest accolade that I can get.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

On Sundays when I speak, I hopefully give somebody something that they can use the next day at work or at home.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Sometimes, if you begin to sing in a halfhearted mood, you can sing yourself up the ladder. Singing will often make the heart rise.

I never woke up and thought, ‚I really want to live a bold life.‘

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I tell everybody, I get so much because I give so much. I give freely, I give all my time, give all my money, give all of my soul. I try to motivate people. I try to inspire them.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.

Brad will tell you. He puts a movie on, I’m asleep in 10 minutes. I have no patience. But the kids love action movies with comedy, Jackie Chan and all that.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.