The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.

We were the guys on the other side. It was hilarious.

I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.

Your relationship with an agent has got to be mutually beneficial. If you can't help their careers, then they're not going to be interested.

And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.

The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.

I rewrote it and I took all your notes. Read it again, that kind of persistence paid off.

Being a lawyer in New York sucks because you're working eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week.

A spontaneous interview feels differently than anything else you see on television.

Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.

Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.

Here's the rule that I set for myself, and I believe it - even on a show like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm': the more personal you are, the wider your audience.

I don't believe any particular ethnic group is smarter than any other group.

I don't really dissect comedy. Nothing kills off humor more than overanalyzing it.

I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

I used to have a theory actually that, if you've had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you're going to make a lousy comedian.

In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.

On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' it takes almost a year to get 10 shows written. It always reminds me of my old yeshiva days, where you used to sit over a piece of Talmud and analyze everything that was going on.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.

The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.

The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

When I started, you didn't make a lot of money by being a comedian. You didn't get a lot of respect.

When I talk to Steve Martin, he's joyful when he talks about comedy.

You don't need to be stable to be a stand-up comedian.

My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

One fantasy is that I just do a Don Roos movie every year if that's possible. If he'd have me.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I'm interested in sex as a way of communication, I'm not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene.

There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agenst or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.

Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

I think I'll give it up, the fantasy is over, I wanted to play Spiderman, Peter Parker.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.

The idea of it becomes a little freaky if you're dealing with someone who has trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality, but that's a concern no matter what kind of movie you're dealing with.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I believed totally in the possibilities implied in the series. I never thought of it as fantasy. Far from it.

The minute I forget to balance reality with the fantasy, I'm going back to Virginia.

Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.

I absolutely adore working in the realms of fantasy.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

Wuxia is a fantasy world exists in everyone's mind.