“The human condition means that we can zone out and forget what the hell we’re doing.”

He’s going on and on and on, and finally he stops. It’s just total horror, and the camera’s still rolling. You can hear it, sort of a grinding noise. And the director says, “Anything else, Bud?”

Buddy Hackett [was] talking – this is Hackett, not me – about the Virgin Mary, a limerick sort of thing, and all these children and families … the look of absolute horror.

You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey.

Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice to the rest of you.

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?

Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It’s not for the acting, that’s for sure.

There aren’t many downsides to being rich, other than paying taxes and having relatives asking for money. But being famous, that’s a 24 hour job right there.

I don’t know what my fans are going to think. It’s definitely not what they’re used to from me.

I think all phases of one’s career are serious if you take it seriously no matter if you are doing high profile dramatic pieces or not.

While I have felt lonely many times in my life, the oddest feeling of all was after my mother, Lucille, died. My father had already died, but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely, yet I did.

I know how to be sour. I know that taste.

I met a woman who photographed celebrity dogs for a book, and she told me that Ralph Lauren’s dog is named Rugby. I said, Yeah, but his real name is Stickball.

Every day, he was talking to the studio about this helicopter shot.

Disneyland. The world’s biggest people trap, built by a mouse.

Those are my people, you know? The ones who are going to crash and burn.

The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything.

Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to the other. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to us is beautiful.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.