It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.

Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

A grown man, weeping, is a tough thing to see.

All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.

Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!

Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it's hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy's show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.

Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.

Every so often, there is an article saying the old kind of talk show isn't possible now. In the oldest kind of talk show, you only had the choice of that or two other channels!

Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.

Every time someone says, 'You know, we really ought to get together,' if I were really honest, I would ask 'Why?'

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

Great humorists are great insulters.

Greatly talented performers don't know - often spectacularly - what's best for them, don't know what their talents really are, and don't know what's just plain wrong for them.

Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.

I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.

I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they're qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.

I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, 'Kid, don't make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you're like David Frost. Make it a conversation.'