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

I prefer to be in a video than to play with it.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.

Kids end up seeing my movies anyway but some of the mothers get mad at me so I figured I’d make one that I can’t get yelled at for.

I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn’t get his video on MTV because he was considered to be ‚urban.‘ The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I’m gone, after I’m dead.

Reggaeton is something else – it is part of pop culture. It is something very big that I don’t believe will ever die.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

There are no second acts in American lives.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Disneyland is a show.

‚Young Indiana Jones’ was one of the happiest times I ever had, so I love television.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.

In Beverly Hills… they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

I would remind you the lesser of two socialists is still a socialist.

‚The Simpsons‘ appearances were great fun. But I don’t take them too seriously. I think ‚The Simpsons‘ have treated my disability responsibly.

Maybe I’ll give Broadway a try. But you know what would be great? Hosting the Oscars. I promise you, that would be a show no one forgot.

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

Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions… entertainment… cares and anxieties… and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.

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

I think Americans are very patriotic.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.

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

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.

I don’t like to be bored.

Football games are on TV, and it doesn’t affect stadium attendance at all. It’s the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Movies were invented for Jimmy Cagney, and he was invented for the movies. A perfect match.

I met Will Smith twice. I didn’t talk to him for too long but I was trying to let him know that my age group grew up watching him – he was the coolest guy on television and the coolest guy in movies.

You entertain people who are satisfied. Hungry people can’t be entertained – or people who are afraid. You can’t entertain a man who has no food.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

I like the good life too much, I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

Anybody that doesn’t like Cardi B a hater!

I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

No. I mean those people really did something for designers I don’t think department stores can, could or should do still today. Today the world is different so you have to make it differently. There’s TV. There’s a lot of things.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

I’m a pretty funny guy, and I would love to do a comedy with a bunch of funny guys – movie-star guys, where they could help me through it.