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

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.

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.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

Reality is beyond speech and thought. Only that which can be expressed in words is being said. But what cannot be put into language is indeed That which IS.

Moving away from “useful” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.

To transcend emotion, silence is the best language.

The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.

At times it does not really matter what language you are speaking, especially when you are emotional and try to reach other hearts.

Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional.