“Meryl Streep belongs on anybody’s list of greats.”

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.

It’s not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

It’s a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.

My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.

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.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing – nothing at all or in any way – be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

It’s no fun being a specimen.

It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.

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 have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.

If I were running a campaign, I’d urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely – on a talented young comedy writer.

Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.

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

Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.

It is moments like these that force us to try harder, and dig deeper, and to discover gifts we never knew we had – to find the greatness that lies within each of us.

Produce great men, the rest follows.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.

The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.

I am grateful for all my victories, but I am especially grateful for my losses, because they only made me work harder.

It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius.