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

My mother kept the house clean and we ate good.

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else’s words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

You know you are getting old when people tell you how good you look.

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.

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.

I had to bring myself back down to being a normal person again.

There’s certainly more work for me in TV these days.

When the passion isn’t there, the drive isn’t there and it just doesn’t last for me.

I love Pilates, I really do, and I do it three times a week because it works well for me.

I have definitely been in experiences where my girlfriends have outgrown me.

I always had an actor within me.

I can catch the ball. You’ve got to throw it to me.

I’m one with New York, and New York is one with me. I grew up there; there’s no escaping it.