"What she doesn't say is just as important as what she does say -- but there's so much more of it. I think from now on I'm going to stick to what she actually does say because I don't have that kind of time."

"Steven had a great line. They were askin' us "What's it like as a comedian in front of 80,000 people?" And Steven said "If you're swimming in the ocean, it doesn't matter how deep the water is. All you can do is swim.""

"About five years ago, somebody showed me some web sites that had my material all over them, and I thought that was fascinating. One reason was, I'd never seen my jokes written one right after another like that. I write on drawing paper—I don't even like lines on the paper—so I have notebooks all over the place with handwritten pieces of my act in them. So to see it go by, all typed out neatly, was like, "Wow." And then two or three years ago, someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad."

"I tried to hang myself with bungie cords. I kept almost dying."

"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter."

"In school they told me "Practice makes perfect." And then they told me "Nobody's perfect," so then I stopped practicing."

"I have a paper cut from writing my suicide note. [sighs] It's a start..."

"I bought a new camera. It's very advanced. You don't even need it."

"They say you're not supposed to put metal in a microwave oven... They're right."

"Sometimes I talk to myself fluently in languages I'm unfamiliar with... just to screw with my subconscious."

"I need one of those baby-monitors for my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I'm really thinking about."

"Lots of my friends have babies, but I don't have any babies. But I have lots of friends; babies don't have any friends. They all have those baby-monitors so they can hear the baby from the other room, which I consider a form of wiretapping. One day there's gonna be a really smart baby who makes a fake recording of some fake baby noises... gonna crawl out of the window and go to Italy."

"I wish the first word I ever said was the word "quote," so right before I die I could say "unquote.""

"I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbour said 'Are you going to help?' I said 'No, Six should be enough.'"

"I woke up one morning, [my girlfriend] asked me if I slept good. I said, "No, I made a few mistakes.""

"A lot of people are afraid of heights; not me, I'm afraid of widths."

"I bought some powdered water, but I don't know what to add."

"Sometimes you cannot hear me, it's because sometimes I'm in parentheses."

"Everywhere is walking distance if you've got the time."

"I went to a museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums."

"When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything."

"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."

"I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen it."

"I was once walking through the forest alone. A tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear a thing."

"I recently went to the hardware store and I bought some used paint... it was in a shape of a house. I also bought some batteries, but they weren't included, so I had to buy them again."

"[unenthusiastically at the beginning of every show in response to audience applause] "Thanks.""

"I hate going to funerals because I'm not a mourning person."

"The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall. … The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it."

"At fifteen one is first beginning to realize that everything isn’t money and power in this world, and is casting about for joys that do not turn to dross in one’s hands."

"A baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child. The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical. … That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong."

"The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?" That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to consider other possibilities."

"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."

"Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted."

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."

"I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine."

"Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony."

"So who's in a hurry?"

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know."

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

"A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated."

"Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?"

"There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them."

"I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists."

"Anyone will be glad to admit that he knows nothing about beagling, or the Chinese stock market, or ballistics, but there is not a man or woman alive who does not claim to know how to cure hiccoughs."

"There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either."

"The only cure for a real hangover is death."

"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands."

"I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I think that the Younger Generation is up to something.... I base my apprehension on nothing more definite than the fact that they are always coming in and going out of the house, without any apparent reason."

"A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down."