“Great humorists are great insulters.”

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.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

Greatly talented performers don’t know – often spectacularly – what’s best for them, don’t know what their talents really are, and don’t know what’s just plain wrong for them.

It’s not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

It’s a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.

My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

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.

They call me a poet, but I’m just a victim of the memories we share and a great observer of the universe of us.

You get broken you pick yourself back up, you get scarred you wear them beautifully, things that were meant to destroy you, you overcame them with such great might.

I think teen-age love is a great thing. There’s nothing quite like it and never will be for the rest of your life.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

Don’t buy their greatest lie – social media.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely great.