“The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.”

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

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.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.