“I write these shows one joke at a time. There’s no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there’s not continuity.”

I believe that a bad Super Bowl halftime show is still better than a soccer game.

Anything I write that I consider stage-quality work, I won’t give my TV show. I put it in my live show.

The bulk of my fans are my age, and I’m aging at the same rate they are. That makes me relevant. They like hearing what I have to say. I work hard at it, but it’s addicting, really.

There are two kinds of comics; there are the ones who build bridges, and then there are the people who walk across the bridges as though they built them. The bridge builders are few and far between.

It went from Bob Newhart to Flip Wilson to Bill Cosby to Richard Pryor to George Carlin to Cheech and Chong. I had all these records.

It never dawned on me that I had the option of becoming a comedian. I come from a little dirt street town in northwest Texas, and they really don’t talk about the arts there much on career day.

There were years when I was a beer and tequila guy, then I got real fat. And then I found that you could actually go on a diet and drink scotch. Then I got hooked on scotch, and if you get hooked on scotch, then everything else just tastes wrong.

I always found that the closer I got to who I really am, on stage, the more they responded to it.

My uncle was a preacher, and I used to go watch him preach. He was also funny, so I’m very ‘preacher-ish’ on stage, not by intent but because that’s where I learned to talk in front of people.

I’m set up where I make a lot of money doing stand-up, and it’s easy.

I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.

Here’s how I operate. When I see something I like, 20 years later, I ask her brother for her phone number. She don’t even see me coming.

I’m not willing to drag my fans down a road I don’t believe in. That’s just my one little principle. I’ve only got one, and that’s it.

There have been times when I played more than others, but I’ve been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I’ve always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.

My biggest pet peeve, I guess, is other comedians criticizing Larry the Cable Guy.

I want my fans to feel like we’re always in touch. Because without ’em, I wouldn’t be able to do any of this.

For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion.

The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.

Indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.