“The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.”

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.

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?

when you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy; when you go smile and let the world cry for you.

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.

Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.

Divorce was emotionally traumatic for me. It was the death of a dream. I was in fairytale land, and the reality of it wasn’t so. But I don’t really like talking about it anymore, because it feels like a thousand lifetimes ago, and also it makes me look desperate like I need it for attention.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.