To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It’s commenting or observing or twisting life.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff.

Someone once asked me, ‚How long does it take to do your hair.‘ I said, ‚I don’t know, I’m never there.‘

My life is my message.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

I’m a meathead, man. You’ve got smart people, and you’ve got dumb people. I just happen to be dumb.

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

Wit is educated insolence.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The other day I… uh, no, that wasn’t me.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

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

Life begins on the other side of despair.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

I think it’s funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.

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

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

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

I must have read every issue of ‚Punch‘ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‚Three Men in a Boat.‘

We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

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

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.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

There’s something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she’s only measured water in it.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

All through Latin America, there’s sharp condemnation of the criminal atrocities of Sept. 11. But it’s qualified by the observation that although these are horrible atrocities, they are not unfamiliar.

A Jewish woman had two chickens. One got sick, so the woman made chicken soup out of the other one to help the sick one get well.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won’t have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

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.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.