“The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.”

The thing is that where I want to go isn’t necessarily tied to what’s going on there politically, but I think Vietnam is a really beautiful country. I think Thailand is also really beautiful.

[Harold Pinter] is a British playwright and is one of my favorite writers. Harold was very obsessed with when memory becomes mythology, that at some point you change your memory to fit who you believe you are.

I can’t do Christopher Walken impressions anymore, thanks [Barack] Obama.

Being around Lily Tomlin has been great, how she treats people, how she handles herself, how she goes about interpreting her character or deciding how the comedy should work.

There’s a difference between a sense of humor and a sense of funny. A sense of humor is knowing what makes you laugh and a sense of funny is knowing what makes other people laugh. The journey of comedy, in a sense, is negotiating those two worlds.

Anyone who buys a ticket can just go in there, and I don’t like everyone, so I always see concerts as like, I’m going to get punched, I’m going to get elbowed, I’m going to get stepped on, get spilled on, someone’s going to hit me with their body odor or something.

I think Batman Returns is right for riffs. I love it but it’s the ultimate Tim Burton movie. There is so much that happens that’s crazy and there are a ton of things to riff.

I just got diagnosed with tendonitis which is such an insulting diagnosis. Just point to my shoulder and say “old.”

Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That’s sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.

Sometimes I have young comics that ask me, “What should I do when I meet an agent or a manager and they ask me stuff?” And I say, “Well, they always usually ask, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, 15 years?’ And it’s good to have an answer for that.”

The audience is not your boss. They are your collaborators and when you collaborate with someone you don’t have to listen to everything they think or say.

If you’re driving down the street, you keep the neck forward. So that way you can clear out the lanes.

Netflix is very protective with their information .

I am afraid of abandonment, and, if you will, in a really existential way, being exposed as a fraud. Everyone’s afraid of it, and I definitely am. This is a fear that motivates. Oh, and heights. And getting stabbed.

You can fit two United States and maybe a third one into the entire continent of Africa, but on a map we make the entire continent of Africa look like the size of the United States, which is why a lot of people don’t know that Africa is a continent. They think it’s a country because it looks as big as we do.

I read recently that I was born in Arizona. I wasn’t born in Arizona. I was born in New Mexico, but I can understand why people might confuse those two Southwestern desert states.

The way a dancer can bring the crowd to its feet with a drawn-out, well-executed pirouette is the excitement I wanted to capture with this design.

We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God….We’re here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.

In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

Every time I reach a new audience, that means I’m doing something right.

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.