“When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, ‘You’re doing a Jewish act.’”

Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up ‘vaudeville’ in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says ‘Milton Berle’ – and he made it just a tremendous party.

The other day my house caught fire.

Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it’s hard to turn away.

You do live longer with bran, but you spend the last fifteen years on the toilet.

I had a sympathetic role in ‘thirtysomething,’ and in two weeks I’m going to do the role again.

One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, ‘It’s a little cloudy.’ I took the tube from her and said, ‘Let me run it through again,’ and drank it. The nurse fainted.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

I made it, Ma – Carnegie Hall. And I didn’t have to practice.

One thing I’ve never said in my whole life is, ‘Let’s have dinner at a Japanese restaurant.’

We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that everybody was celebrating my birthday. That’s what the trees are all about.

For me, that wasn’t such a joke, because my birthday was always around this time.

Then, of course, you’re hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.

Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.

Let’s face it: It’s difficult enough to be funny without worrying about what is going to offend whom.

Marriage is nature’s way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

Try it first And you’ll see its a blessing And it’s not a curse

In order to have peace, we must first have trust.

Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa.

I’ve decided the secret of parenting is benevolent neglect.I put my family last. Because if you don’t, if you put them first, they never thank you. You’ll never get a word of thanks from them.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

My first job entailed spending a summer working in a cornfield in nebraska.

Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.