When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

I love nerdy, cute, quirky boys who don’t take themselves too seriously.

I was extremely lucky that I had two great wives. It sounds a bit funny to say that, but it’s absolutely true.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

Stand-up is my baby.

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

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

I have no problem yelling at anybody’s kid – free of charge!

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it’s feet first!

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

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!

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

I can’t say that my disability has helped my work, but it has allowed me to concentrate on research without having to lecture or sit on boring committees.

Politics is applesauce.

The fact is, when men carry the same ideals in their hearts, nothing can isolate them – neither prison walls nor the sod of cemeteries. For a single memory, a single spirit, a single idea, a single conscience, a single dignity will sustain them all.

I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

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.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

It’s a funny old world.

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.

She’s been married so many times she has rice marks on her face.

Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

You know an odd feeling? Sitting on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar.

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

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Since the very beginning, Emeril’s had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

I like quips. I like whiffs of cynicism and I think they can be witty. But I don’t really know where wittiness is constructive.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the ‚Boston Phoenix,‘ and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that’s where I first saw ‚deadpan.‘

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

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

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

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

If you spend your life competing with business men, what do you have? A bank account and ulcers!

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

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

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

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