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

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.

Failure. It doesn't exist. 'Failure' is just what happens when we lose perspective.

I hate it, but a popout is the same as a strikeout. It's a matter of productive at-bats, a matter of how you do it.

I haven't been approached to do anything, but I would certainly make room for it. It was a really fun time.

No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.

He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

For years, critics of Fannie Mae have warned that it does not give them enough information to judge its risks.

I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music-that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of life.

One of the threats to Christianity in the 21st century is this idea that religion is best understood as a kind of aesthetic experience, and that you can get all your morality from that.

I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website from my tumor sizes into a spreadsheet.

Marry in haste, repent in leisure.

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.

You start realizing that maybe you're the one night a month that people have out, and they don't need to hear your political views or how dark you can get. They just want to laugh for an hour and go home. Once I wrapped my head around that, my act evolved accordingly.

What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.

Choosing to hate is proving your inferiority.

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails.

If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilisation.

In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.