“With comedy, you never know until you put it in front of an audience. You shoot it and a year later you have no idea if it’s going to work. And then you get the response. It’s great when it’s good.”

I love money. I love everything about it.

The greatest thing you can do is surprise yourself.

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

No art comes from the conscious mind.

There’s no better way to learn something than to learn it in front of an audience. Your terror drives you.

The banjo is such a happy instrument–you can’t play a sad song on the banjo – it always comes out so cheerful.

A father carries pictures where his money used to be.

Don’t have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.

I was always very shy but as I get older I think, What am I being shy for? You just grow weary of your own hang-ups.

It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing.

You can’t really conduct your life by one or two phrases.

Teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.

I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.

Acting is collaborative because you are working with another actor, and it’s almost like a two-man juggling team. You have to really be in sync.

You have to get comfortable with your work, you really have to know what you’re doing, and it has to be almost boring to you to be able to do it well.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

I want the best product for my audience, and if I don’t care 100%, who will? It’s my name, my likeness that goes out there.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.

A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.