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.

In case you’re wondering whether I lip synch, the answer is no… people think so because I sound so good.

She laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.

There’s nothing like white trash at the White House.

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

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

How you go about testing is just very different to just being in the situation of qualifying, having to go out, having to nail the lap.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

Logically, harmony must come from the heart… Harmony very much based on trust. As soon as use force, creates fear. Fear and trust cannot go together.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

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.

The bat is not a toy, it’s a weapon. It gives me everything in life, which helps me to do everything on the field.

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

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

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I don’t even know how to speak up for myself, because I don’t really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you’re always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I’ve done for 25 years. I don’t need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.

I’ve seen George Foreman shadow boxing, and the shadow won.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

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

If God is just, I tremble for my country.

I’ve had the honor of speaking at many commencements.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

I often joke that 100 years from now I hope people are saying, ‚Dang, she looks good for her age!‘

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

I write all of my own speeches.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing ‚Happy Birthday,‘ like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, ‚Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!‘

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.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I look just like the girls next door… if you happen to live next door to an amusement park.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‚Where’s the self-help section?‘ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

If I wished to do something, even if I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to make the effort with me, I would go out solo climbing. I did find solo climbing very challenging and a little frightening. You knew that you were completely on your own, and you had to overcome all the problems and possible dangers.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Proper sleep has helped me get to where I am today as an athlete, and it is something that I continue to rely on every day.

Wherever I go meeting the public… spreading a message of human values, spreading a message of harmony, is the most important thing.

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt with Guess on it. I said, Thyroid problem?

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

I’m sure the feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useless by it, can make you extend yourself beyond what you would regard as your capacity. If you’re afraid, the blood seems to flow freely through the veins, and you really do feel a sense of stimulation.

No man goes before his time – unless the boss leaves early.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.