“Everybody I know is a joke writer.”

When I was 20, I used to go around telling stories, and I knew where I was comfortable – onstage, talking, making ’em laugh and listen to the weirdest things. I liked being the center of attention.

I’ve got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Car.’ I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.

I love Cincinnati, but you can keep that spaghetti chili product!

I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade… And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

I was considered by my peers to be a good comedian. So that’s all I ever strived to do was get some recognition from my peers.

The first thing I ever got my hands on was Andy Griffith’s ‘What It Was, Was Football.’ I was fascinated with the fact that every syllable made it funny, and I would laugh even though I didn’t know what any of it meant.

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 would have rather been beat by a plumber than Kathy Griffin.

I begged the universe to make me a famous comedian, and it did. So I tend not to ask for any more.

I still love to walk on stage and make people laugh, and I work very, very hard at it, and I take it seriously.

I believe that a bad Super Bowl halftime show is still better than a soccer game.

Anything I write that I consider stage-quality work, I won’t give my TV show. I put it in my live show.

The bulk of my fans are my age, and I’m aging at the same rate they are. That makes me relevant. They like hearing what I have to say. I work hard at it, but it’s addicting, really.

There are two kinds of comics; there are the ones who build bridges, and then there are the people who walk across the bridges as though they built them. The bridge builders are few and far between.

It went from Bob Newhart to Flip Wilson to Bill Cosby to Richard Pryor to George Carlin to Cheech and Chong. I had all these records.

It never dawned on me that I had the option of becoming a comedian. I come from a little dirt street town in northwest Texas, and they really don’t talk about the arts there much on career day.

The Bible affects everybody’s life who is a Christian, from the middle class in Europe to the peasant in Africa and Asia.

Christmas is a time when everybody wants his past forgotten and his present remembered.

You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

There’s one thing everyone should understand: I like my character.

When a high-profile personality lives like I do, everybody thinks that person is fated to die young.

How I grew up, everybody was telling me, “You can’t do this, you can’t get tattoos, you’ve got to look a certain way.” Now, I’m like, “Why?”

Let’s let everybody believe what they want to believe. And that means, P.C. police, don’t you be coming down on people who believe in God and who believe in Jesus.