“I do live like a rock star, but it’s not as great as it sounds. It’s a lot of traveling.”

I love Cincinnati, but you can keep that spaghetti chili product!

I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade… And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

I was considered by my peers to be a good comedian. So that’s all I ever strived to do was get some recognition from my peers.

The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith’s ‘What It Was, Was Football.’ I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I’m definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won’t. Then three years later I will finally try it and it’ll kill them. I got to give them more credit.

I would have rather been beat by a plumber than Kathy Griffin.

I begged the universe to make me a famous comedian, and it did. So I tend not to ask for any more.

I still love to walk on stage and make people laugh, and I work very, very hard at it, and I take it seriously.

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.

I’ve always juggled a lot of projects because at least half the projects you do get shelved.

You think a lot of people get to be big stars and get a little crazy.

Lots of cosy sky That God and I can share. I need air. I need air.

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.

Ed Sullivan brought me to TV first in 1952, then Garry Moore’s program gave me a lot of confidence and freedom.

When I was on the air a lot my throat and vocal chords got tired.

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.