“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.”

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, ‘It was a perfect script for she and I,’ inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, ‘Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?’

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

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.

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.

Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up.

The comic-book industry today is not what it was back then, unfortunately. Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books.

The method of producing comics in Japan is very hectic, but it’s also rewarding because it’s possible to do both the story and art all by yourself. In this way,

Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn’t an issue.

No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.

“What you do for a living?” It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics.

To me, my favorite comic book movies were the ones that were never based on comic books, like Unforgiven.

I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.