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.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here’s the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

The reason that I’m here at all is because of my relationship with my family and their encouragement of me to be a musician and to work hard. As long as I stay there in that space, I can do anything. That’s my truth.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

Standing ovations have become far too commonplace. What we need are ovations where the audience members all punch and kick one another.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

What really motivates people at Facebook is building something that’s worthwhile, that they’re going to be proud to show to friends and family.

All parents are concerned about their children’s well-being. As a parent of three kids, I’m very concerned about their well-being.

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

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

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

Stand-up is my baby.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

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.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one’s direction seconds after its birth.

That’s what I do this for, to secure my family’s future. I don’t care about anything else. I’m able to spoil people, and that’s the best thing.

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

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

A man should never neglect his family for business.

I grew up in a funny way.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‚What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!‘

When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.

Comedy Central was a great network, but ‚Chappelle’s Show‘ took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the ‚Chappelle‘ reruns. For BET, the ‚Real Husbands of Hollywood‘ has that same potential.

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

Nobody can ever make enough money for as many poor relatives as I’ve got. Somebody’s got a sick kid, or somebody needs an operation, somebody ain’t got this, somebody ain’t got that. Or to give the kids all a car when they graduate.

I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out.

After momma gave birth to 12 of us kids, we put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep Daddy away from her.

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

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.‘

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

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.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

My real dream is to have a whole, like, buy a whole piece of land. Imagine, like, a long driveway. Like, a cul de sac-type street, with maybe, like, seven houses. Me be right here. Have my mom be able to be right here. My brother over here. My girl’s grandmother and family right here. Friends over there. That’s my real dream.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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.

It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.