“By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.”

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy’s show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty – and evaporating quickly.

I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

I’m sure I’ve all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer’s ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.

I find most ‘sacred music’ pretty dismal.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, ‘It was a perfect script for she and I,’ inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, ‘Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?’

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

If my father was alive to hear that, he’d turn over in his grave.

I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which, was that you can fail at what you don’t want so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

My father used to brag that I wasn’t a ham, I was the whole pig.

Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head up high above all the others. Never disgrace the generation of your fathers. They were the bravest champions.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am really never alone. My identity is through that line.

Why should we not pray to our mother who are in heaven, as well as to our father?

I want to be fulfilled in myself, rather than try to follow exactly in my father’s footsteps.