I was always making my friends laugh, but I never wanted the attention of the whole classroom.

I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

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.

I’m half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I’d be in a hell of a mess!

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

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

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

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

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

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

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

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

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

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

If anything, we should feel sorry for the people who want us to feel bad about ourselves, because they are the ones struggling for approval. In middle school, bullies tortured other kids because they thought it would make people like them more.

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

Stand-up is hard.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.

It’s a funny old world.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

I have often wanted to drown my troubles, but I can’t get my wife to go swimming.

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

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.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‚President Can’t Swim.‘

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I wanted a name I could shape the music towards. I was going to Miami quite a lot at the time, speaking a lot of Spanish with my friends from Cuba – ‚Lana Del Rey‘ reminded us of the glamour of the seaside. It sounded gorgeous coming off the tip of the tongue.

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

I would never win an award for not loving pizza.

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.

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever – one day we will overhear it.

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.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

I think I have always had a little humor.

Stand-up is my baby.

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga, they said I was very theatrical and they said, ‚You’re Gaga‘.

He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.

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.

My son is becoming me – just a silly, silly prankster guy.

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

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.