“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.’”

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

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

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

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.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

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.

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

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

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

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

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it.

We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of His messages and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.

Keep your jacket buttoned. Always. It’s just really flattering—it will take pounds off you.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Nothing speaks like results. If you want to build the kind of credibility that connects with people, then deliver results before you deliver a message. Get out and do what you advise others to do. Communicate from experience.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

When people talk to you in such glowing terms, that is the time to be very, very alert because the worst of the mistakes are made in the best of the times.

There are two things which a man should scrupulously avoid: giving advice that he would not follow, and asking advice when he is determined to pursue his own opinion.