I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.

Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

I don't do anything the same every day. Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.

I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated. I don't do anything the same every day.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you. I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated.

I have never pretended to be any kind of super-religious kind of man, but I feel very strongly that you can be funny without being dirty.

I know you can be funny without being filthy.

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.

I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.

I was always an observer, even as a child. I could be satisfied to sit in a car for 3 hours and just look at the street go by while my mother went shopping.

I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.

My mother and father were very strange people. They tried to be funny which is always very sad to me.

My mother had a radio show - a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

The most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning - it's a man or a woman without a sense of humor.

Well, the most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning - it's a man or a woman without a sense of humor.

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

I define success as being comfortable with yourself and your life. And that is about as good as it gets, really.

No one is guaranteed happiness. You can pursue it, but if you happen to find success along the way on that road to happiness, Conservatives believe you should not be demonized or penalized for it.

PR is extremely important, and being able to use it in the right way means everything. You have to market your success.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

There's no such thing as an overnight success. It took me a long to get there.

The secret to my success is that I bit off more than I could chew and chewed as fast as I could.

Our brave soldiers and support personnel are engaged in a battle as important as any the United States has ever before waged, for the success of democracy in Iraq is a crucial test of the ideals this Nation was founded upon.

With the success of the last three or so years, when a lot of people start treating you differently, there's a danger that you may start to think of yourself differently. You rely on your friends to say, 'Hey, wake up!'

I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.

And I, uh, I wonder how anybody can think his personality changes with his success. I've had quite a bit of success but I feel that I'm just the same person as I always was.

It's the thing that you do well that brings you to prominence. The very thing that brings you to success can also be like a curse, because then people think that's all you can do.