Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

As a human being, anger is a part of our mind. Irritation also part of our mind. But you can do – anger come, go. Never keep in your sort of – your inner world, then create a lot of suspicion, a lot of distrust, a lot of negative things, more worry.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

I hate smiling. It makes me feel weak and powerless and small. I’ve always been like that; I don’t smile in any pictures.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

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

I should be a postage stamp, because that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. I’m beautiful. I’m fast. I’m so mean I make medicine sick. I can’t possibly be beat.

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

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

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

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

I was training to be an electrician. I suppose I got wired the wrong way round somewhere along the line.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

There’s a part of you – the born-again part, your spirit – that’s dead to sin. That’s why it bothers you now when you sin. The ‚wilderness‘ part of you – your soul – is your unrenewed mind, out-of-control emotions, and stubborn will.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

It’s probably the worst feeling in the world, when you’re deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she’s not feeling you the same way, and you don’t know why.

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

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

My husband calls me ‚catfish.‘ He says I’m all mouth and no brains.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

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

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

People say I look so happy – and I say, ‚That’s the Botox.‘

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

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

We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

There’s a scripture that says, ‚A merry heart doeth good like medicine.‘ I think that’s true, too.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. So I distance myself, because I feel everything.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

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.

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.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?