“I took my sports experience to my life on stage. That’s why I’m so disciplined. Playing sports, I was always underestimated. I was never picked first to do anything. This always helped me. It taught me how to push myself.”

Why do people love Richard Pryor so much? ‘Cause he had problems.

My family are police officers, detectives. My brother Mitch is FBI. Mitch is like that – a stern enforcer.

I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father – who I had only recently met – died.

I wasn’t disciplined at all. As good of an athlete as I was, I was not disciplined. Had I had the drive that I have in comedy, and acting, and writing, that’s why I knew it just wasn’t right for me.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn’t changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

I’m funny. I’m a comedian. I’m not a clown.

Making people laugh is what I’ve been doing since I was like four or five years old. I still have a lust, I still have a passion. I don’t care about how I look, I’m dedicated to the laughs.

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them.

The one thing about comedy, making it become a part of you, the audience loves it, because you become part of them.

People like rumors. They’re going to say things like, ‘You was at the club with Lil’ Kim, and you and Kanye West got into a fist fight.’ You can’t get upset. You’ve got to keep hope alive.

I want to play a villain – I can’t wait to play a villain.

I’m an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.

I don’t ever watch myself. By watching, you try to perfect yourself, become a robot.

I want to do something that people can really say, ‘Hey, man, that was good, I’m proud of you, I’m proud of that.’ ‘Pride’ and ‘Transformers’ and things like that.

I’ve never been no superficial cat.

Comedy has been so good to me.

Selling high or low doesn’t mean anything. It has to do purely with the market.

I never regret anything.

The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay.

A meditative mind is at ease because it’s not trying to acquire anything.

We never had reports of Mullah Omar living luxuriously or making money in large quantities or anything like that.

Tell me, if you thought a man had a tendresse for you, but he wasn’t doing anything about it.

If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. When you start to see the light that you really are, the light waking up in you, the radiance, you realize it has no intention to change you.