Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted.

Does the New York City Ballet affect other places? Yeah, it lets people know they should come to New York.

The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive.

I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do.

I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force.

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

The kinds of shows that seem to work now, the comedy shows, are those which require very little attention. They're superficial and I like articulate comedy.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

I grew up wanting to make movies, and along the way I suddenly found that I had a career doing comedy.

I really enjoy comedy. It's a real challenge.

I've mainly been in dramas, so this is one of my first comedy kind of performances in Cecil B. Demented.

Well I sure had been looking for a comedy for years without any success.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

Stand-up comedy and poverty. Those were my two main endeavors.

It seems like when I first started, people got into comedy because they wanted to be good comedians.

It is really hard to do comedy; it takes a lot of energy and focus. It's rather like music: It's a lot of hitting notes precisely.

This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.

The English can be a very critical, unforgiving people, but criticism can be good. And this is a country that loves comedy.

Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.

I'd really been wanting to do a television series. I was looking for a comedy.

I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

Comedy is really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title.

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

My mom and dad are both in stand-up comedy, so that's where I started, that's where I got everything. My roots are holding the mic.

That title, is one of the things I fought for. A lot of people said "But it's stupid, and it's the title of a comedy movie, and people won't take it seriously," and I'm sure there are some people who still don't. But for the most part, people do see that we really have a quality show.

I mean comedy is something that's very personal and people have strong opinions about.

I would recommend that anyone who wants to do comedy on TV to do radio first.

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.

I'm doing comedy development at National Lampoon.

Comedy is ridiculously hard. And if the rhythm is not right, if the music or the line is not right, it's not funny.

I left Indiana, and I ain't been back since. I've been doing comedy and paying my bills.

Harpo Marx looks like a musical comedy.

I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.

And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.