All Quotes

"I am in show business. I don't, for a minute, ever forget that this is a business that I'm involved in, and it plays by business' rules."

"I don't think I have something that's pronounceable as a philosophy. ... When it was fashionable to say, "May the Force be with you," I always said, "Force yourself." ... I'll say again then, "The Force is within you. Force yourself.""

"Flying is the tension between freedom and responsibility. The obligation on every flight is to ensure the safety of the people aboard. It's serious. And I continually have to meet the standards. And: it's the third dimension! We're living the two dimensional life here on the ground. When you get up there and you see the third dimension - that's what's so exciting about these kids, the Young Eagles. You fly 'em over their house and it's the first time they really know where they live."

"It is a bit of a shock to discover that there are things that a writer can bring to a script that you recognize as a shadow of your own experience. You don’t necessarily actively draw on some specific thing that happened to you—but it’s in the bank, and you want to spend it."

"I can tell you this: If I’d been less successful, I’d probably be a better parent."

"Which I still get shit about from my wife, like I don’t take mental health seriously. I do take mental health seriously. I was trying to say, as I explained to her: It’s that I accommodate all of the flaws that people go to psychiatrists to accommodate, because I accept my flaws. I accept my flaws and my failures—I don’t accept them, I own them. And certainly the more constant gardener is the better parent, and I’ve been out of town, up my own ass, for most of my life."

"[Donald Trump] doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket."

"[The President dislikes wind turbines because] he has just not seen a gold one."

"[On climate change] I knew it was coming, I have been preaching this stuff for 30 years. [...] Everything we've said about climate change has come true. Why is that not sufficient that it alarms people that they change behaviors? Because of the entrenched status quo."

"He's losing ground because everything he says is a lie [...] I'm confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies. But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication to realize that we human beings are capable of change. We are incredibly adaptive, we are incredibly inventive. If we concentrate on a problem we can fix it most times."

"We are teetering on the edge. [...] Indigenous people are the stewards of much of the remaining standing forests and contain the hope that these precious places can be preserved. The science has proved the value in their preservation but that does not keep them from encroachment, and the protection they are granted is tenuous in some of the countries these assets exist in."

"I'm in a room of actors, many of whom are here because they've been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work. While I'm here to receive a prize for being alive. That said, it is a little weird to be getting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the half-point of my career."

"I found a calling. A life in storytelling. An identity in pretending to be other people."

"Ours is a tough business to get into. In my case, it's been a tough business to get out of, thank God."

"Sometimes, we make entertainment. Sometimes, we make art. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we make 'em both at the same time. And if we're really fortunate, we also get to make a living doing it."

"[Thank] you to SAG-AFTRA for honoring me with this prize; this is very encouraging."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a good thing a lot of people speak foreign languages, otherwise those people would have no one to talk to."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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.""

"Money is like a sixth sense - and you can't make use of the other five without it."

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."

"What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature."

"Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it."

"To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day."

"Money is the string with which a sardonic destiny directs the motions of its puppets."

"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."

"A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden."