“People confuse friendship and relaxation. It’s incredibly important to be relaxed – you don’t have a chance if you’re not relaxed. So I try very hard to relax any kind of tension. But friendship is different.”

When I started, the scripts weren’t as good, and you’d have to have a huge burst of energy to go, “Sheesh, how am I going to? This stuff’s no good.”

Harold Ramis and I together did the ‘National Lampoon Show’ off Broadway, ‘Meatballs,’ ‘Stripes,’ ‘Caddyshack,’ ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day.’ He earned his keep on this planet. God bless him.

When you did the job, you thought you were just trying to amuse your friends who are all on the job. I’m just trying to make the sound guy laugh, the script supervisor.

So you’d have to improvise something or create something or try to work with the ware and try to figure out, how do you make this visually and orally acceptable, entertaining?

Everyone needs to take a vacation from the sort of automatic things you do.

I’m not an ungenerous person; I don’t resent it. It’s just sort of a head-scratcher.

You don’t have to have all this film stock, you can work faster, and you don’t need a giant crew. It’s great.

We still have to put some cherry syrup on it, and then we can eat it

And even if we win, if we win, HAH! Even if we win! Even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days; even if God in Heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field.

You can tell how boring a person is by the lack of fear in their eyes when someone is flipping through photos on their phone.

You have to hope that [good things] happen to you. […] That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in.

The critics. When they’re right, they’re right for the wrong reasons. And they’re usually wrong.

I go home and stay there. I wash and scrub up each day, and that’s it. One month I actually grew a moustache, just so I could say that I’d done something.

I’d like [Santa Claus] to give Wes Anderson, the director, enough money in his next budget for an aerial shot – just a little copter shot. He really wanted this one helicopter shot, and Disney wouldn’t give him the money. Just wouldn’t give him the money.

Chicago actors are hard-nosed. They’re tough on themselves and their fellow actors. They’re self-demanding.

The cool part about naming your kid is you don’t have to add six numbers to make sure the name is available.