“I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.”

Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

Create your own visual style. Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God’s plan. Everybody thinks that if they don’t get it, they’re some kind of odd man out. And it’s not true. Nobody gets justice – people just get good luck or bad luck.

A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I’m definitely guilty of thinking something is funny but thinking the audience won’t. Then three years later I will finally try it and it’ll kill them. I got to give them more credit.

I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will.

My son says I never tell stories about anyone who’s living.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

When I talk to audiences about the size and age of the cosmos, people often say, “It makes me feel so insignificant.” I answer, “The bigger and more impersonal the universe is, the more meaningful you are, because this vast.