“I’ll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.”

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.

I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

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

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

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

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy’s show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty – and evaporating quickly.

I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

I’m not going to make movies that tell children, “You should despair and run away”.

Our lives are like the wind or like sounds. We come into being, resonate with each other. Then fade away.

Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction.

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

I’m a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation.

Happiness and love are just a choice away.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.