“It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.”

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?

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.