“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.”

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.

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.

I don’t like to run. You will not see me running on a treadmill ever. Ever! I like boxing, though, so if I can go to the gym and box for 30 minutes, I will.

It’s much less daunting once you’ve put your foot on the road to it. I’m a notorious couch potato and I don’t like exercise. Half an hour of physical exercise, like jogging or fast walking a day is a start.

The smallest changes, like I stopped eating meat and I’ve been doing different kinds of exercise like Yoga and stuff like that, little changes have made me feel a bit more at peace I think.

You can’t read about push ups. You gotta do them.

The very practice of reading [the Bible] will have a purifying effect upon your mind and heart. Let nothing take the place of this daily exercise.

People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.

Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs or alcohol.

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.