“I think if journalists start doing that then they won’t be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won’t be practicing satire.”

You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of “I’s,” and a listening audience somehow turns each “I” into a “me.”

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast – you sort of can’t skip it.

I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios

Writing well isn’t just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.

Making an idea into an emotion.

I think – the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?

The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

We [women] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce… and yet we’re still doing majority of family unpaid or low paid labor.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it.

I have been in control of what Ive been doing, of the career Ive put together.

I admire the ones who keep coming back and doing it, time after time.

Don’t do stuff that freaks him out, like what you’re doing now. Do something that makes him happy.

If you can serve everyone who visits you, you must be doing well in business.