“I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.”

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

I don’t have a mission. I don’t have a torch to burn.

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you’ve gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.

These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me; it’s a sign of security.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn’t beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

I love writing songs. I’m a songwriter.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I’ve always felt okay in Berlin.

Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.

I’m still a horse that can run. I may not be able to win the Derby, but what do you do when you retire? People retire and they vegetate. They go away and they dry up.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Horror itself in that fair scene looks gay, And joy springs up e’en in the midst of fear.

You’re going through the horror of it, you’re going through the isolation of it but you’re being empowered by reminding yourself that you’re connected to everybody else.

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

All our horror at such an union was due entirely to prejudice and the offspring of such union would be healthy and pure as any other.

The best of humanity’s recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

I’m a huge horror movie fan. Beyond belief.

Great learning and superior abilities…will be of little value and small estimation unless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity are added to them.

Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson