When you come to my show, I want it to feel like opera, like a theatre.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

Much of everyday life is filled with opportunities to be distracted. Our possessions… entertainment… cares and anxieties… and even the passionate desire and pursuit of things, some good and not so good, can keep our minds and hearts caught up in a flurry of activity.

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?

I really like children to watch my movies.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

I was a dancer for many years. I was a premier dancer with ‚Porgy and Bess,‘ the opera. And I taught dance some, in different places.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I make pop culture.

Pop music will never be low brow.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Seeing a live Kenny Chesney show, you know what you’re going to get. You know it’s going to be an all-day party.

I want to consistently play well and win titles. I’m only at the beginning.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s called ‚Scalia/Ginsburg.‘ The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I prefer to be in a video than to play with it.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.

I’m not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together. In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it’s the recording or the performance side.

I’m really happy and had such an amazing time performing at Super Bowl – wish I could relive it all over again.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

‚Leading man‘ just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

I want to show audiences I can act.

I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke.

There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate.

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.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

I saw MotoGP on TV first, before I saw F1 and other types of car racing. It’s what I got more into. It was cool, there was good, exciting racing.

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

I’m a pretty funny guy, and I would love to do a comedy with a bunch of funny guys – movie-star guys, where they could help me through it.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

No duty the Executive had to perform was so trying as to put the right man in the right place.

Besides entertainment and action, I want to educate. You know, as a producer or director, we do have a responsibility to society.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Growing up I didn’t watch movies.

Comedy Central was a great network, but ‚Chappelle’s Show‘ took it to a completely different level. Other shows got bigger because so many viewers were watching the ‚Chappelle‘ reruns. For BET, the ‚Real Husbands of Hollywood‘ has that same potential.

Maybe I’ll give Broadway a try. But you know what would be great? Hosting the Oscars. I promise you, that would be a show no one forgot.

My whole life is a theater piece.

I can’t act!

According to Lifetime, I don’t know anything about TV.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

At Real, psychological pressure on the players is much more serious than at United. This is good. At many clubs, you don’t know the consequence of playing badly.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

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.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

I’m not really an actor, I’m a reactor; I’m a pitchman. That’s what I do best. Nobody can do it any better.

The tradition of the South is not urban… I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.