“Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.”

The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

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.

I find most ‘sacred music’ pretty dismal.

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.

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.

Great humorists are great insulters.

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.