“By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.”

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, you saved my dad’s life.

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.

An effective speaker can do more damage or more good in a well-stated minute than an angry klutz could do in half an hour.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.

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.’

Its fun for me to go on other folks talk shows. When youve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody’s list of greats.

I’m not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don’t happen.

We can’t rely – or no country can rely on just a single personality to carry it forward. And so what the American founding fathers understood was that institutions were built for human imperfection not human perfection.

A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society.

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn’t talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten.

My parents divorced, and I didn’t have much of a daddy growing up.

I want to thank my mum, my daddy, my coach, my teacher, everybody in my life.

If God, like a father, denies us what we want now it is in order to give us some far better thing later on. The will of God, we can rest assured, is invariably a better thing.