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

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

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.

I make fun of situations and try and find the humor in things, but it’s never at the expense of the other guy.

If I had to describe myself to an alien I’d say I was bigger than the average human, enjoy a drink or two with a good meal and have a bigger head than most. I’d also say I’m really handsome – especially if they were a female alien.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Politics is applesauce.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

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.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

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

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

I’m an only child.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

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

I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

There used to be an old bad joke. I hope it’s not so much a good joke anymore. ‚Everybody’s from Scranton; no one’s in Scranton.‘

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I think that, ah, I’m a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

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.

I was always making my friends laugh, but I never wanted the attention of the whole classroom.

When I was ten, I won the horseshoe-throwing contest at summer camp. I was also the Wiffle ball champion in my town.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It’s literary suicide.

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

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.

Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

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.

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.‘

Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

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.

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.

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

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

Is it weird in here, or is it just me?

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

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

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.

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

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.

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.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother’s kitchen. If I don’t have time to cook, I’ll just read a cookbook.

I went to the bank and asked to borrow a cup of money. They said, ‚What for?‘ I said, ‚I’m going to buy some sugar.‘

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

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can’t bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

It’s very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that’s not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It’s a gut feeling.

What’s with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?