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

You’re not going to see my sense of humor on the football field. That’s not a place for me to joke around.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

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

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

I mean, families are weird.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‚Present‘ or ‚Not guilty.‘

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

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

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

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

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Love is a serious mental disease.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

I’ve had no problem harnessing anger.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

I didn’t start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born – I started getting wicked BO. You know there’s a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

I do think coaches need to get away from the game more, though. It’s good for them.

Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress and thus tones the spirit just as exercise conditions the body.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‚Yes,‘ you know he is a crook.

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!

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.

I’ve seen George Foreman shadow boxing, and the shadow won.

He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

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

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

I’m crazy, but I’m not too crazy.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

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

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid.

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

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

All of our problems start in our minds.

An unemployed court jester is nobody’s fool.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

My son is becoming me – just a silly, silly prankster guy.