“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 trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.

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.

I cannot keep myself away from ice cream. I have two flavors that are my favorite: chocolate chip cookie dough and vanilla swiss almond. I can eat a whole pint of ice cream in one sitting, no problem!

Now I wonder why we’re f-ked up as a race. I’ve read the Bible. I can’t find the word “bunny” or “chocolate” anywhere in the f-king book.

Chic Murray once told me he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, “Did you fall?” He said, “No, I’m tryin’ to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket.”

I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment. That’s why I buy Kinder Surprise. Horrible chocolate; nasty little toy: a double-whammy of disillusionment! Sometimes I eat the toy out of sheer despair.

As we were told, was presented to him in golden cups… I observed a number of jars, above fifty, brought in, filled with foaming chocolate of which he took some.

Fruit of all the kinds that the country produced were laid before him; he ate very little, but from time to time a liquor prepared from cocoa, and of an aphrodisiac nature.

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

I ran through the manuscript in the space of a day, much as one might pick compulsively at a box of chocolates. It was simply too provocative to put down. Has the potential of being highly influential inside the field and among an informed public.