“When the phone started ringing too many times, I had to take it back to what I can handle. I take my chances on a job or a person as opposed to a situation. I don’t like to have a situation placed over my head.”

You’ll never be good if you don’t know that you are.

You know…they say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant.

Groundhog Day’ was one of the greatest scripts ever written. It didn’t even get nominated for an Academy Award.

There’s only a couple times when fame is ever helpful. Sometimes you can get into a restaurant where the kitchen is just closing.

I don’t answer fan mail. I don’t have time for that. It’s like hundreds of thousands of people who think they’re going to become millionaires getting autographs from movie actors. I don’t have time for those idiots. I’ve got stuff to do.

The atheists traditionally hold their conventions from Good Friday to Easter Sunday during the hours Christ spent in the grave.

I’d sort of gone through some sort of spiritual change in the late 70s where I sort of saw there was some other life to live. It changed the way that I worked just having a different presence and a different tension.

I think midlife crisis is just a point where people’s careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.

Every moment that you share someone else’s pain, feel what they feel, makes you more human.

You know the theory of cell irritability? If you take an amoeba cell and poke it a thousand times, it will change and then re-form into its original shape. And then, the thousandth time you poke this amoeba.

Just beat my record for most consecutive days without dying.

To people who want to be rich and famous, I’d say, “Get rich first and see if that doesn’t cover it.”

I think we’re all sort of imprisoned by – or at least bound to – the choices we make… You want to say no at the right time and you want to say yes more sparingly.

He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, “Anything else, Bud?”

Buddy Hackett [was] talking – this is Hackett, not me – about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families … the look of absolute horror.

You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance?

I would say to you that Americans of Hispanic descent want desperately to give their children the chances they never had.

Good memories are our second chance at happiness.

If your goal is to be comfortable, chances are you’ll never get rich. But if your goal is to be rich, chances are you’ll end up mighty comfortable.