“Meryl Streep belongs on anybody’s list of greats.”

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing – nothing at all or in any way – be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

It’s no fun being a specimen.

It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.

Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it’s painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it’s extremely painful.

I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.

If I were running a campaign, I’d urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely – on a talented young comedy writer.

Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

Every time someone says, ‘You know, we really ought to get together,’ if I were really honest, I would ask ‘Why?’

Why are sex and violence always linked? I’m afraid they’ll blur together in people’s minds – sexandviolence – until we can’t tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, “The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.”

There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

Depression – it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven’t been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it’s truly different.

Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.

Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.

I’m not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

Opportunities, many times, are so small that we glimpse them not and yet they are often the seeds of great enterprises. Opportunities are also everywhere and so you must always let your hook be hanging. When you least expect it, a great fish will swim by.

Greatness is not found in possessions, power, position, or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service, and character.

Know, O beloved, that man was not created in jest or at random, but marvelously made and for some great end. Although he is not form everlasting, yet he lives for ever; and though his body is mean and earthly, yet his spirit is lofty and divine.

It is the gods’ custom to bring low all things of surpassing greatness.

The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.

The greatest ideas, the most profound thoughts, and the most beautiful poetry are born from the womb of silence.

The mind is the greatest bomb.

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.