When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

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

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

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.

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.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

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.‘

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

MySpace is my wife… Facebook is my mistress.

I look at other people’s lives, and some people feel like they’re too old to play with toys. But I still go through the toy section at the store, ‚cause there were toys that I wanted when I was little that I couldn’t have. So I still get them.

I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend’s garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I met who knew more electronics than I did at that point. We became good friends, because we shared an interest in computers and we had a sense of humor. We pulled all kinds of pranks together.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?

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

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.

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

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

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

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn’t any consistency.

Laughter is America’s most important export.

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

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

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

I have often wanted to drown my troubles, but I can’t get my wife to go swimming.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.

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

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

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

I don’t like magic – but I have been known to make guys disappear.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches.

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

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her way back.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

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.

When I was a kid, I loved Elvis, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. But I had no connection to Hollywood – and being a movie star was such a far-fetched idea, growing up in Hawaii.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

Wit is educated insolence.

Don’t be getting sloppy drunk and telling them dirty jokes.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‚Where’s the self-help section?‘ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.

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

I would never win an award for not loving pizza.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.