When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

When I’m being funny, I try not to offend. I don’t think much of what I’ve done has been in really ghastly taste. I don’t think I have embarrassed many people or distressed them.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

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

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

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

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

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

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

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

My success comes in making fun of whatever you’re doing. That’s my way.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

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.

If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help… Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

But, you know, it’s still a drag to get your picture taken when you’re eating a sandwich. It’s a downer.

We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, ‚Wow, Really! You don’t even know me and I don’t know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.‘

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.

OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

Why, I’d horse-whip you if I had a horse.

I’m no genius.

Stand-up is hard.

All people are born alike – except Republicans and Democrats.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

I was just a goofy little funny kid, who was always getting sent to the principal. It wasn’t serious because I was smart. I wasn’t like a true troublemaker, just rambunctious – like, talkative and trying to be funny. That was me in middle-school.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I’ll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‚Hey, I wrote a song.‘

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

I’ve found that men I’ve dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I’ve found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren’t competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been… challenging.

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

It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.

I just think it’s so important not to take yourself too seriously.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

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

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

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.

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

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.