“It’s crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.”

Everyone is sort of in their own little area counting lines and no one talks when film’s not rolling. There’s constantly actors coming to me back behind the monitor screaming at me, “Why did my line count drop?” It’s a nasty tense environment.

Animals talking are very rarely funny. But animals behaving as animals – always funny.

Hollywood has to appeal to the broadest audience, and when it comes to most social and economic issues, America is progressive. Because of that, the messages that are in Hollywood movies tend to be, for instance, pro-environment.

Blazing Saddles’ is one of the funniest movies ever made.

I gotta say – if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I’d love that article.

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

Dave Herman as Michael Bolton is one of my favorite performances ever.

So you’re doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it’s working, and at that point, it’s 50/50 as far as what’s funny and what’s working.

“Firewall” seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides “military” and “government?”

My mom then got Pell Grants, put herself through college to get a degree to get a better job. Because we were broke, I then had to go to a state school.

I think that the job of art and culture is to jump on that time and realize that it’s there and to push it just a little bit faster.

This was the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations.

Hardly socialism. In fact, it was a Republican plan to begin with.

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

It so happens that America, according to all the polls that are out there, is pretty progressive. So you’re not going to see messages that support Ayn Randian individualism at the cost of the whole, because most people don’t agree with that.

Hollywood is for-profit, is what Hollywood is. All the studios are owned by big, megacorporations that are the furthest thing from liberal you can possibly imagine.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave

The time to hesitate is through no time to wallowin the mire Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre

Funerals are important rituals. They don’t just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.

It’s my policy not to review funerals.

Life is lived on its ownother’s shoulders are used only at the time of funeral.

A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation’s young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.

My mum had 14 pregnancies – but only four of us survived. We had a little sister born for a few days and she died. There had to be a funeral.