“People are always ruining things for you.”

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I’m not kidding.

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.

I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

How long should a man’s legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

I want to make people laugh and I want to try to encourage world peace.

What’s good for me is certainly not good for other people.

People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they’ll join your side.

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

If you’re going to make a comedy and if your sole interest is in making people laugh and feel good and entertaining them, then you check your ego at the door.

We need to make sure middle-class people are able to pay the bills. We need to make sure that poor people don’t starve. Those are values, too.

My fans mean more to me than they will ever know. I call these people my friends and my confidence and if they are here to see me and they are here to support me, then that’s all I need in life.

Democrats don’t relate to middle-class people.