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’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

‚Best Man Holiday‘ was a very successful film.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

I’m all about surprises. If you watch a horror movie, and it’s called ‚Kiss Land,‘ it’s probably going to be the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

I don’t want people at my shows to come out and say, ‚I just saw a cool show.‘ I want them to say, ‚I had fun at the show.‘ I want it to be a collaborative thing and be part of the audience and have them be part of me. I try to interact with everyone there and have them be equal to me because they are.

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.

It just seems there’s better things to do in your life than be on television if it’s not interesting, if it’s not challenging, if it’s not fun. You know? When it stops being those things for me, I’ll stop making television.

I sell escapism.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

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.

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

There’s a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven’t. You just do the best you can.

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.

My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

I love Steve Carell.

Most of the stuff I do on the show comes out of me just trying to make my friends laugh.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.

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

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

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.

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

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

I don’t spend too much time on my phone, laptop or television. However, I do occasionally watch documentaries and shows on streaming platforms.

I’ve always wanted to do a family movie.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

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 do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

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

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

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

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.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.

I’ll be like Bob Hope, touring when I’m 100.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‚I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!‘ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.

Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I’m a showgirl, as you can tell. I’m ever ready.

Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.

The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

According to Lifetime, I don’t know anything about TV.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‚Doctor Who.‘ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war – for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

SNL is a home. You’ve got all of your brothers and sisters there, and it’s a great time.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.