American Comedian Quotations

The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.

Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.

You must give to get, You must sow the seed, before you can reap the harvest.

There can be a fundamental gulf of gracelessness in a human heart which neither our love nor our courage can bridge.

Yes, I tried to change the classical style in a way that people who don't understand it can enjoy.

A husband is what's left of a sweetheart after the nerve has been killed.

Where there is a will there is a way. And this must be the way not of compulsion but of cooperation... No government and no plan can succeed without it.

I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear.

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.

Be kind to people on the way up - you'll meet them again on your way down.

I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.

The only real happiness a ballplayer has is when he is playing a ball game and accomplishes something he didn't think he could do.

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.

People who don't use the tools given to them only injure themselves.

I try something new every night. It's an hour show; if it works I maybe try it a few more times and then move that off and try something new. It's a great workshop for me.

I am not a Sufi, but I follow the Sufi.

Nobody can stop you but you. And shame on you if you're the one who stops yourself.

At Motel 6 in Amish Country I wonder if they leave the light on for you?

Admitting Error clears the Score, And proves you Wiser than before.

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

I don't excercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.

With a definite, step-by-step plan - ah, what a difference it makes! You cannot fail, because each step carries you along to the next, like a track.

When people start dancing, they dance like they don't know they are doing it.

We must have as clear a picture as we can of the Australia that we want to achieve at the end of that time.

Susan, an only child who never had any roots, and I, a lone wolf who got married 20 years to late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us.

Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

Then, there was Cary Grant. He spent three hours a week in hospitals teaching nervous people how to eat jello.

Every suggested idea produces a corresponding physical reaction. Every idea constantly repeated ends by being engraved upon the brain, provoking the act which corresponds to that idea.

The Australian people want to help build this country into a great nation. This budget... has not realized the capacity of the Australian people. It has underestimated them. It has let us down.

The less food, the more time to talk, the more to talk about.

That was one of the things that interested me about the character. He doesn't want to be a hero, and has no real desire to save the earth or discover aliens. He's sniffing around looking to see what will fall in his lap.

I love to go to the playground and watch the children jumping up and down. They don't know I'm firing blanks.

No one, ever, wrote anything as well even after one drink as he would have done with out it.

Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?

My grandmother was a Jewish juggler: she used to worry about six things at once.

Yes, you've got to sing from the depths of the heart.

With Guard and Reserve units, you can end up with a lot of people from one part of the country dying in one day, and that gets people's attention.

It is a great privilege for any man to become a member of the Senate.

My father is a Jehovah's Witness, and he raised us under a very strict hand.

If it had been what was supposed to happen, it would have happened.

It's really live television, the way God meant it to be.

He didn't want me to become a musician, he wanted me to be a doctor, because he said singing was too hard.

Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.

Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn't popular in the inner cities.

The people of Australia would be staggered to learn that Australia has no national development plan.

Some struggle is healthy. If you can embrace it rather than be angry, you can use it as your pilot light.

I'm not really a heavy smoker any more. I only get through two lighters a day now.

I walked in thinking, 'I have ten movies under my belt and now they want me to go back to making commercials?' I said, if I do that, I want it to be funny.

In the fall of 1943 we brought home our second son, whom we named Alexander.

I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can.

I can't discriminate? Oh, that's ripe, coming from a straight white man. What's the matter, baby doesn't feel like he belongs? Well why don't you try a place that was set up just for you? Like the world!

An optimist is a girl who mistakes a bulge for a curve.

I'll tell you the truth; I wanted to leave me for Sid Caesar.

To begin with, you must realize that any idea accepted by the brain is automatically transformed into an action of some sort. It may take seconds or minutes or longer - but ideas always produce a reaction of some sort.

They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh.

These three elements are called Qawwali, and they've got to be there.

And for my family, comedically, that was the key to a lot of the humor.

A real estate closer. Oh, what's that? I'm a real estate opener. What is a real estate closer? You mean at the end where you've got to sign all those papers?

You give the guy an Image Award three years in a row and then turn on him like that? If that's the role they want to fulfill, they need to send a clearer message.

I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.

If we'd had another carefree 70's, I'd have been dead. It was a little too carefree, you know? I don't know how carefree they were for me, I think I was worried then, I can't remember what about.

I do listen to other music though, and try to pick up what is good.

No, I believe in the good will of the United States' administration.

We are deeply conscious of the fact that our north and west must be developed.

I was 12 years old when I had my first job, delivering packages.

Everyone is treating it like a Hollywood story. In Madison, it's a neighborhood story.

I got access to a private tour of the zoo. I got to go in a cage with a koala, which I highly recommend.

So we are fulfilling our task in preventing serious armament stocks in Iraq within our possibilities.

And my marriage was perfect when I wasn't famous.

People are still willing to do an honest day's work. The trouble is they want a week's pay for it.

The more things you do, the more you can do.

So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.

Not only do I sing to him, I sing entire conversations. You become Jerry Lewis.

In his day, the audience was well aware of the music, of the classical beat.

Well, that our main concern is that Iraq should not become a divided country.

Being a celebrity, I don't even have to talk.

We didn't even think about it, you know? I used to collect laser discs, and you'd have some college professor analyzing It's a Wonderful Life or Citizen Kane, and now it is pretty funny - the idea of commentary for a silly kid's movie, you know?

You have to be funny about it and honest about it. You can't leave yourself out of that mix. You have to be honest enough to say, I'm that messed-up one in the family.

Look at me, I'm getting defensive about something that happened so many years ago, somebody said. I'll have to find out who that was and if he's still alive.

They didn't even like Margaret Thatcher but at least there was Margaret Thatcher. There have been women, you know, Sonia Gandhi for heaven's sakes in India.

But my kids, my brothers' kids - they think about trying to top what we did.

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my Scotch, I say I'm thirsty, not dirty.

The reason we're so dangerous is because we're totally harmless.

I have tried to make the music a bit easier for them to understand.

We signed up for Showtime, which I think put us on a Homeland Security list somewhere.

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.

The armies, the difference of all of those armies that had been fighting each other and the Taliban took advantage of that to rule over the whole country.

My kids have a competitive drive I never had growing up.

I have to approach my life in this way so I can do what I need to do, and do it very well.

There was expectations that the fights there, the operation there might be extended for several months, even for several years. But within a few weeks it ended, because obviously the Taliban wasn't a real force.

I guess they're tough jokes. But there's lots of things you either laugh or cry at. And you just can't cry.

I don't feel like I even need to contribute.

Because I am afraid of commitment. This movie certainly has some bearing and is some reflection of my real feeling about relationships, because I do have commitment issues. My friends tell me I have intimacy problems, but they don't know me, so who cares what they think?

I throw it all in there, Kung Fu, blaxploitation, horror.

A lot of funny stuff happens in Canada.

I find this proposed amendment very, very, very, very shocking. And immoral. And, you know, if civil disobedience is the way to go about change, then I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco.

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.