“I had a sense of who I was before I got famous.”

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we’re evolving as a race.

Excellence in anything increases your potential in everything.

That’s my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard.

When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.

Excellence in anything increases your potential in everything.

People love to see people fall.

Haters are all failures. It’s 100% across the board. No one who is truly brilliant at anything is a hater.

There’s a never-ending ocean of techniques out there.

That’s my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard.

The key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel.

So instead of investing your time in a passion, you’ve sold your life to work for an uncaring machine that doesn’t understand you. That’s the problem with our society. And what’s the reward? Go home and get a big TV.

Richard Pryor is, in my mind, the most honest comedian. He bared his soul to people. I think that’s why everybody loved him so much.

Once you understand what excellence is all about, you see how excellence manifest itself in any discipline.

If you can lie, you can act, and if you can lie to crazy girlfriends, you can act under pressure.

Have you ever talked to someone, and you’re not even really talking to them? Actors are the worst for that.

People for the most part can smell lies.

I was the most famous kid in the United States. That was 1936.

Wanting to be an actor and wanting to be famous are different.

What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

The result, I think, is pretty interesting … we don’t expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped or hit The Ed Sullivan Show or the circuses or the big top.

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

See, ‘A Time to Kill’ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

If you become famous and don’t have a live show to back it up, they’re not going to pay you any money.

I don’t like to do material people have heard. Now, they like to hear material that they know, because that’s the stuff that made me famous, and, unfortunately, I don’t do a ton of it.