“In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.”

You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?’

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

I’m not all that enthralled by show business, and I’m not that much of a highbrow.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

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

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

It’s lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

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.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.