“It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.”

The feeling is that Fidel Castro’s much bigger than he actually is.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code – even though it was a great yawn – also showed people’s interest in religion.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

The aging process seems to strike first at the mechanism which warns that we have been talking too much and the listener is growing restless. The signal isn’t perfect at any age – drink, for instance, throws it right out of kilter – but it is almost non-existent in old people.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

I didn’t have a very religious family.

To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

When you’re interviewing someone, you’re in control. When you’re being interviewed, you think you’re in control, but you’re not.

Most attractive males talk to most attractive women as if they were Rotarians comparing sales percentages in Des Moines.

But for Muslims, everything that they don’t have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters – and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy – from lack of character.

Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.

Little girls are the nicest things that happen to people.

Sometimes doing the forbidden can be nice.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

Not only are they just great, nice guys; they’re some of the best musicians you’re likely to find.