“Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.”

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.

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 think it’s really easy to be the altruistic hero of your own narrative and story.

Boxing is real easy. Life is much harder.

There is a girl on fire a woman choking a body walking into the ocean and they all have my face. They all have my heart because I give that away so easily.

J.S. Bach was easily the greatest musical innovator in the history of the world. He was so advanced for his time. There’s a spiritual depth to his music. You can listen to it and it’s like meditation.

That’s my gift. I let that negativity roll off me like water off a duck’s back. If it’s not positive, I didn’t hear it. If you can overcome that, fights are easy.

With experience in boxing, you learn how to be a scientific boxer and how to fight easy.

In boxing, I had a lot of fear. Fear was good. But, for the first time, in the bout with Muhammad Ali, I didn’t have any fear. I thought, “This is easy. This is what I’ve been waiting for”. No fear at all. No nervousness. And I lost.

There’s a saying, ‘It’s easy to write songs, but very difficult to write great songs.’ I’m going through that right now.