“In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.”

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.

It is not hard to deceive ministers, relatives and friends. But it is impossible to deceive Christ.

Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.

Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders.

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.

That man who is without religion and mercy should be rejected. A guru without spiritual knowledge should be rejected. The wife with an offensive face should be given up, and so should relatives who are without affection.

Offspring, friends and relatives flee from a devotee of the Lord: yet those who follow him bring merit to their families through their devotion.

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.