actors-from-philadelphia

"(Money) doesn't make you better than anyone. You need it in this society, but you shouldn't let it go to your head. I like it to keep people off my back and to help people I know who really need it."

"When God talks, you got to listen, and I swear life is funny. Because some of the craziest things that happen to you end up being the things that you needed most. And in this case, I honestly feel like God basically told me to sit down."

"Understanding that we’re in control and that, at the end of the day, it’s you against you. If you are putting yourself in a position to be the best version of yourself, then it means you’re understanding yourself. And understanding yourself means that life isn’t perfect and it’s never gonna be perfect, but it’s about progression."

"I feel that in today’s time, what people are most selfish with is information. Nobody wants to give information. You got to ask for it. If you ask for it, then, “All right, maybe, maybe I’ll tell you some stuff”, but it’s a search and find."

"When you start doing it for the perceptions of others, you’re never going to win. Your biggest believer in what you do should be you."

"Avoid the simple problems, because they become the big problems."

"People make mistakes, and from mistakes they should be allowed time to recover."

"We’re putting a group of men together that are talented enough and aren't afraid to make fun of themselves."

"A thin and sickly kid, I was pushed around and beaten up by bullies throughout my childhood, until I grew bigger than everybody and it stopped, I knew very well how they operate, and specifically the joy they take in scaring people. I’d stared them in the face so often that it wasn’t particularly challenging to do an impression."

"The interchanges I would have — of course, most of them were positive, and most people understand the movie, but there were plenty where the guys would want to put me in a headlock, or push me around a bit, or get into a little tussle with 'that tough guy from Back To The Future, because he’s not that tough after all'. Well, I’m not that tough after all, because I’m an actor; because it’s pretend! And I think that social media, the greater intimacy, maybe — I mean, part of it is false intimacy, but part of it’s real intimacy; you can go and see things about an actor, that’s kind of why I do the YouTube thing, to present, ‘this is me as a person’, that the audience, now, the pop cultural audience, is a more sophisticated audience and a more multi-faceted audience."

"A comedian is not a man who opens a funny door. He opens a door funny."

"This [the Chick-fil-A same-sex marriage controversy] is the perfect American conundrum because it's like: “Ah, you know, we should be moving forward as a country, but also— I want to eat just so much trash, like a garbage monster, as much as I can.”... Now that you know this shit, don't eat that fuckin' sandwich anymore! It's that simple! You can't get it out of your mind, you know it, you know it, you'll always know it! You can't stop knowing it. And really— don't fuckin' eat Chick-fil-A! What are you doing?— it's garbage! Treat yourself better. Even if you're not going to treat other people who don't have the same rights as you better, treat yourself better than that."

"In the line of work that I'm in, every day is Saint Patrick's Day. So I might decide, any old three o'clock in the afternoon, it's Saint Patrick's Day today!"

"You have to eat before you drink! If you remember nothing else I've said tonight, remember to eat before you drink!"

"Facebook... is the worst thing in the world. Why are we all still on it? What are we doing? We have the power to bring it down. I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook. What is going on? What is this world that we're in?"

"The Internet has opened the door wide to the world of haters. I'm a viral kind of guy so I know that being on Twitter itself is just asking for it. But thankfully, I see a lot more lovers than haters. And the haters I get, if I happen to see them I block 'em. I just don't need to do negative anymore. When you perform live, eventually you're going to make direct eye contact with that one guy in the audience with his arms folded staring back at you. But I process it differently now. Maybe I misread that guy. Maybe he was just cold or checking his armpits for sweat or just had a really bad day. And the great thing is, if I ever need a counterpoint to the arms-folded guy, I can just go right to my Twitter account and read, "@bobsaget is my favorite person in this entire world." And then at the last minute I can decide not to post it."

"I get vaccinated five to six times a day and I feel great!!"

"Full House gave me Tourette's. We would be on the set, and, action! "Okay, Michelle, you can't have a horse in the house--" and, cut! "Cock sh*t f**k!""

"People ask me what my favorite episode of Full House is; it was the last one!"

"This woman woke up to see me and John Stamos banging on her windows. She must have thought she died and went to sitcom hell."

"If you laugh at that, you lower the bar, and I will limbo under it because I am a f*cked-up guy!"

"Kids, do not f*ck that sh*t; you'll get an infection."

"That would be a good public service announcement for Nickelodeon: "Hi, this is Bob Saget. Don't f*ck that sh*t. Stay in school. And read!""

"I don't call her my middle child, I call her my center child, Because the world revolves around her."

"I've banged half the girls in this room, and that is f**kin' not true. I haven't banged anyone here. I've put my pinky in your butts, couple of you."

"As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins. But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didn't want to disappoint my mom, but I couldn't take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the most — Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor — had also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldn't say in public."

"In my career I've had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds. By day I've done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, I've gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescent's delight about my grandma's projectile diarrhea. That in itself could, by many psychiatrists' standards, be a bit of a call for help. I never do it to shock anyone, even though people have sometimes thought of me as a shock comic. If it is a through-line or a constant to what I do, it's not something I'm proud of. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It's more of a handicap. Or, depending on your perspective, a gift. It's what I used to think of as my mania. Now I've come to embrace it. You have to love yourself. But not in a movie theater, because they will tabloid your ass."

"I'm always amazed when I go to do stand-up dates and the ad in the paper says, "For Mature Audiences Only." Nothing could be more immature than my stand-up. It's all derived from the silly humor my dad instilled in me. Poop and penis jokes. I really should be billed in perpetuity as "For Immature Audiences Only." I'm in the process of evolving past that. Could take a while."

"As I wrote this book, a lot of people asked me if I had a ghostwriter. The answer is yes. It was Ernest Hemingway. And my house is full of his ghost vomit and urine. Hemingway said something that helped me get through this, my first book: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.""

"What I wanted to share were my feelings about how humor gets you through this life and through all the dark times. For me, it's occasionally irreverent and immature humor. But funny is funny. Like my friend Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "It is what it is." As I was adding those words earlier in this book, I was inspired to call my friend David Permut, who was Rodney's dear friend as well. I don't call David that much — good friend that I am — and I called him on his cell, unblocked. David answered the phone: "You're not going to believe this." I said, "What did I do? Have one of those psychic moments that I'm always bragging I have?" He continued: "Bob, I am standing at this moment on Rodney's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame." He'd had a meeting to go to and visited Rodney's star because he had a half hour to kill. He hadn't been there since the day he and I were there for the ceremony when Rodney got the star. The morning he got some "respect." A moment of synchronicity like that tells me that everything is where it's supposed to be. We all have them; they give us chills and let us know we are truly in the present. The key is to remember the moments. Don't take them for granted. I learned from everyone I treasure — my daughters, my parents, Don Rickles, all my friends and relatives who went through huge losses our entire childhoods — that humor, however you define it, gets us through the saddest of times."

"My dad went through a sea of deaths. The oldest of six, he buried his four younger brothers and four of his children. Yes, I was it. His philosophy after grieving was to laugh. To try to bring some joy to others, because life is just so hard sometimes. Because it ends. My father also had a huge amount of dignity. This Mark Twain quote sums up the way my father and mother felt about life: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." As crazy and dark as I would imagine some of these stories sounded, I am very proud of the life I have led so far. I have a lot of love in my life. And a lot of laughs. And I wish that for you all. I wish that even for the guy in the audience with his arms folded."

"Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries."

"...life is lonely, life is empty. Love isn't everything. A dear true friend is more than love--the serge outlasts the silk."

"Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills."

"I believe in the vast potentialities of mankind. But I see everywhere a wide disparity between what they can be and what they are. That is what I want to say in writing. I want to say the genius of the human race is mongrelized; I want to find out how mankind can be helped out of the animal kingdom into the clear sweet air."

"The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Undoubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago."

"Mr. [John] Barrymore’s smile was the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three before the play is over. I am not an actor-killer, but I like my Hamlets to dislike actors, if you know what I mean, and I think you don’t."

"A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

"He neither drank, smoked, nor rode a bicycle. Living frugally, saving his money, he died early, surrounded by greedy relatives. It was a great lesson to me."

"Orson Welles? What are they?"

"Don't worry. For a man who has been dead for fifteen years I am in remarkable health. Love. Mr. Barrymore."

"I know that back in the twenties everyone who saw it judged John Barrymore's Hamlet to be unforgettable. Great though it was, I found his Richard III even more impressive. Barrymore's sinister, half-mad hunchback became incandescent as he gleefully anticipated his conquest of the Lady Anne. The genius of the actor contrived a slight but inspired alteration of Shakespeare's: 'Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?' The change to 'Never was woman in this manner wooed; never was woman in this manner won' heightened the deviltry in Richard's gloating."

"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill, right? I will run. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, right, there’s two things. You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple, right?"

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, "let me do the most evil thing I can do today." I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was "good." Stuff like that just needs reprogramming. … I wake up every day full of hope, positive that every day is going to be better than yesterday. And I'm looking to infect people with my positivity. I think I can start an epidemic."

"I feel like I could run for President. People often laugh, but if I set my mind to it, within the next 15 years I could be in the White House."

"That was a horrific night, as you can imagine. You know, there’s many nuances and complexities to it, but at the end of the day, I just, I lost it, you know? And I guess what I would say, you just never know what somebody’s going through. In the audience right now, you are sitting next to strangers, and somebody’s mother died last week, somebody’s child is sick, somebody just lost their job, somebody just found out their spouse cheated. You just don’t know what is going on with people. And I was going through something that night. Not that that justifies my behavior at all."

"Keep my wife's name out [of] your fucking mouth!"

"Aaaah. It's Rewind time. If I could controlled Rewind I would want Fortnite and Marques Brownlee."

"It's great to be Black in Hollywood. When a Black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he's Black."