“We want to get people laughing; we don’t want to offend anybody.”

A lot of music is mathematics. It’s balance.

If presidents can’t do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

We’re all blessed with a lot of timidity and a lot of worry and anxiety, and vanity is a good antidote.

Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.

I don’t believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

He who hesitates is poor.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

As far as songwriters, I’ve always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I know how to make it a great musical. I’ve got to. It’s like I’ve got to see it on stage.

I like Chris Rock. He’s dangerous.

Well, just being stupid and politically incorrect doesn’t work. You can be politically incorrect if you’re smart.

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

If I fall, I fall. I’ll rise up like anybody else.

It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else . . .

It doesn’t matter where anybody lives, we’re all here.

The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s efforts.

I actually don’t think that I’m that much smarter than anybody else. It’s just that I frequently just seem to know what to do, and I think that’s wisdom.

I’m not trying to stump anybody… it’s the beauty of the language that I’m interested in.

Anybody who loves country music loves gospel.

I’m the worst person to tell anybody how to date.