All Quotes

"There are times when verbal ingenuity is not enough."

"Nobody is nobody. Everyone has something to offer."

"If all wishes were gratified, many dreams would be destroyed."

"In my experience, nothing is ever what it seems to be, but everything is exactly what it is."

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen all at once."

"Treat us good, we'll treat you better. Treat us bad, We'll treat you worse."

"I speak Spanish to God, French to women, English to men, and Japanese to my horse."

"We have no special constitutional powers, unless you consider the extraordinary rights accorded every U.S. citizen by law, in which case we are amply empowered to go about our business."

"Today's impossible is tomorrow's reality."

"Mystery is the source of all true art and science."

"Be cool, but care."

"Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. (If you wish for peace, prepare for war)."

"The only way to know if a man is trustworthy is to trust him."

"The Mind's a funny thing . . . in the Summer it longs for Winter. In the Winter it longs for Summer. In the Spring . . . it heads for the Bahamas."

"Know that, as in life, there is much that many have looked upon but few have seen because, as my father told me and his father told him, you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth."

"Those in a hurry show only that the thing they are about is too big for them."

"Check it out! - Tito"

"Tito? - Dodger"

"Hey Man Check it out, Huh! - Tito"

"I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you."

"Your problem is your role models were models."

"The impersonality of the communist state is not easy to understand. The huge dangers with which its subjects are daily confronted seem to come from nowhere, while threatening everyone who accepts responsibility for his own existence and so dares to be a man. Franz Kafka described the workings of this machine in a prophetic book, the moral of which many of our statesmen, including Mr Powell, have yet to learn. When they have learnt it, they will also know why The Castle, along with every other work by Prague's greatest writer, is now banned in the country of his birth."

"Kafka's Jewishness was a kind of dream, whose authentic moment was located always in the nostalgic past. His survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in Inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: "With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father's Jewishness, and with their waving anterior legs they found no new ground." Alienation from oneself, the conflicted assimilation of migrants, losing one place without gaining another This feels like Kafka in the genuine clothes of an existential prophet, Kafka in his twenty-first-century aspect (if we are to assume, as with Shakespeare, that every new century will bring a Kafka close to our own concerns). For there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question ("What have I in common with Jews?") has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all Ungeziefer, now."

"I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em … the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen."

"Remember we're all in this alone."

"The work of Kafka … has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God."

"Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic”...Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces. And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young."

"And that's the truth!"

"I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk..."

"Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers."

"There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic."

"What if it's boring... or if it's not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring."

"I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness."

"If you can't be direct, why be?"

"Wouldn't it be great if we all grew up to be what we wanted to be? The world would be full of nurses, firemen, and ballerinas."

"Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?"

"I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe."

"When you talk about yourself for 35 years, first of all, it gets repetitious. And then it seems a little bit excessive, at the least."

"People think there's some real subversive thing playing against whoever it is; a lot of it is just people who want to go along and get along. And they also want to make money. And the bottom line is, they're going to put out as much stuff as they can — stupid, banal stuff that makes money."

"The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do."

"We went to a Southern Baptist church. When I was a small child, until I was about 8 or 9 years old, I worried if I didn't go forward and get saved every Sunday — which I couldn't do, it was absolutely too humiliating to see these adults flailing and beating their breasts and sobbing, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so ridiculous, so embarrassing — I could never bring myself to go forward. And I'd think, Oh, my God, if I don't go next Sunday, if the end of the world comes, I'll go to hell. And that's is a pretty hard thing for a 7- or 8-year-old to carry all the time"

"The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say — out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami — they'll say, "God saved me." As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. … All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance — I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church — they wanted the rapture to come. … We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around."

"9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society."

"Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. … I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 — the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, "Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue." So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away."

"I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person — and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues — she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh."

"Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship."

"Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably — or known to be — gay and ask "Why don't they come out?" But we don't know why they don't, and it's none of our business, really. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75 — it would have been a hard thing to do at that time."

"It's a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We can't decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. … I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy — from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated — but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it."

"Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed."

"For fast acting relief, try slowing down."