“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.”

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.

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

Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?

There should be three days a week when no one is allowed to say: ‘What’s your sign?’ Violators would have their copies of Kahlil Gibran confiscated.

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, you saved my dad’s life.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

An effective speaker can do more damage or more good in a well-stated minute than an angry klutz could do in half an hour.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.

The head thinks. The heart knows.

I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

A heart-memory is better than a mere head-memory. Better to carry away a little of the love of Christ in our souls, than if we were able to repeat every word of every sermon we ever heard.

Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.

My poor sight gives me an advantage. I can’t see the people in the audience who are scratching their heads while I am lost in my role and giving everything I have to the drama.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.

My goal is not to shove information into your head. It’s to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don’t have to tell a child to explore the backyard.

The first woman was created from the rib of a man. She was not made from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal to him.