"When I started out in comedy in the 70s, if you didn't do clean humor you weren't getting on TV, so I started doing that so I could be on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And then when I saw what other people were doing, I just always wanted to be a little different."

"Newman would be my favorite supporting character. I mean, when I got to have a real evil nemesis like Superman would have, that was a dream come true for me."

"The only line I quote from [Seinfeld] [...] is "If you're one of us, you'll take a bite." [...] Sometimes I'll quote Newman in flames screaming "Oh the humanity.""

"You may have noticed that I tend to quit things soon after doing them, like TV series, animated movies, book writing, broadway plays. I do feel very strongly in stopping the second I feel like I'm not excited anymore, whatever I'm doing."

"I was happy with the Seinfeld finale because we didn't want to do another episode as much as we wanted to have everybody come back to the show we had so much fun with. It was a way to thank all of the people who worked on the show over the years that we thought made the show work."

"[Larry and I] never obsess over anything that isn't mundane."

"I still think everything has its life cycle and if you respect it, people enjoy it longer."

"Very early on in my career, I hit upon this idea of being the Heckle Therapist. So that when people would say something nasty, I would immediately become very sympathetic to them and try to help them with their problem and try to work out what was upsetting them, and try to be very understanding with their anger. It opened up this whole fun avenue for me as a comedian, and no one had ever seen that before."

"The thing about [Seinfeld] is that you have to realize that I had to look into the faces of those people, six inches away, so if you think Kramer is funny on TV, imagine his real face six inches from your nose, how funny that is. You can't imagine. It's impossible not to laugh. So I would."

"Never try and make a comedian laugh with one of his own jokes."

"The pitch for [Seinfeld], the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that."

"I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don't have to ever really grow up. And that's the best thing of all."

"If you can walk to work or take your bike on a daily basis, I think that's just about the coolest thing that there is. Every morning I listen to the traffic [report] on the radio, and they talk about how they are jammed and I just laugh."

"Working with the [Seinfeld] cast was pure heaven for me. We were as well suited to each other as it seems when you watch the show."

"You know that tremendous feeling of power, when your phone is fully charged? And somebody calls, and you go "I want to hear every detail of this story! I am loaded with juice!" That's what TM is."

"You don't need to die for what you want to accomplish. And that's what TM is about. [...] I came up with the line that "TM is like you have a cell phone and someone gives you the charger... and you go Oh... this is-- now, I can keep using this thing and it will work all the time!'.""

"When it's your name on the goddamn show... the pressure is-- it's intense! And then, the show got successful, and everybody expected each week to be even better than the last, and it was a lot of pressure. And I loved every second of it, but it was a lot of pressure and a lot of work, and it was all great, but: never could have accomplished it without [Transcendental Meditation]."

"In my world, the wrong-er somethin' feels, the right-er it is. So, to waste this much time on something this stupid is-- that's-- that felt good to me. [...] It's the exact opposite of what we do here at the Times, which is: we spend appropriate amounts of time on deserving subjects. So, I'm the exact opposite of that: inappropriate and undeserving subjects."

"Once this Pop Tart had come into the world, I didn't understand why we were still eating other kinds of food. 'Cause this seemed to be definitely the new way. [...] Two in the packet and two slots in the toaster. 'Why two?' One's not enough; three's too many. And they can't go stale, 'cause they were never fresh."

"That's the hardest part: if you have a long bit, the biggest laugh has to be at the end. It has to be!"

"I'm looking for the connective tissue that give me the really tight, smooth link, like a jigsaw-puzzle link, and if it's too long-- if it's just a split-second too long [...] [I] will shave letters off of words, [I'll] count syllables, y'know, to get it just-- It's more like songwriting."

"How did they know that there would be a need for a frosted, fruit-filled, heatable rectangle in the same shape as the box it comes in, and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in?"

""In the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Pop Tart suddenly appeared in the supermarket! And we just stared at it like [it was] an alien spacecraft and we were like... chimps in the dirt playing with sticks." [...] What makes that joke is you get "chimps", "dirt", "playing", and "sticks". In seven words, four of them are funny!"

"I like the first line to be funny right away. "When I was a kid, and they invented the Pop Tart, the back of my head blew right off!" And that got the whole thing started: that a specific part of my head blew off; not just my head, but just the back."

"I've probably been working on this [Pop Tart bit] for two years. [...] It's a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that's what I do; that's what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time wastefully... so that then, I can then waste their time!"

"Poetry is bad standup. It's carefully chosen words that have no laugh at the end.*"

"To me, America used to be a place that made steel, and cars, and had giant department stores. Now, basically, we produce amateur talent and people [who] judge amateur talent."

"I'll tell you the greatest thing that I've ever achieved in my career: I was on the cover of Mad magazine. And of course, I'm saying "Hello Neuman.""

"Comedy is more personal than food."

"The comedian studies himself; the actor studies other people. The comedian wants to be himself; the actor wants to be anyone but themselves."

"It was the back nine [episodes of a season], was the backbreaker for us, right? You [can] kind of figure out the first ten over the summer; you pull three more out of nowhere; and then the back nine is just-- you're Sandra Bullock in Gravity."

"Our job is not for us to enjoy it. Our job is to make sure they enjoy it, and that's what we did [on Seinfeld]."

"We're all tryin' to get to the same island. Whether you swim, fly, surf, or skydive in, it doesn't matter. What matters is when the red light comes on."

"Jail is such a-- really a way that a grown-up would punish a child. "You go in there and you stay in there!""

"I could talk about comedy a lot, but I think it's kind of like talking about sex: you can do any fancy dive you want, [but] it's just a foot of water."

"The timing of the check coming at the end of the meal makes no sense. 'Cause that's when the food is the least interesting to you."

"I like that [obituaries] boil the whole guy's life down to "Invented the ballpoint-pen spring"."

"Do you think that's how life ends? That you just-- really just go "It's enough. I had enough." I know when my time comes, that how I'm gonna feel. I already feel that way!"

"The idea of bosses and employees is just hilarious to us [comedians]! [...] It's such a typically human attempt to organize what is un-organizable: life."

"Most things that are weird are not "weird good"."

"The improvements in the engineering of cars has enabled people to express their inner asshole-ness. You think "Why are people [today] so ill-behaved?" They're not! They just never had the tools to express it before."

"Being a dad is-- y'know, it's a surfboard on a rainbow. You're gettin' all you can handle of life."

"All human endeavor is killing time. All of it."

"Fear is funny. Especially when it's not fake!"

"One of the things that the comedian mindset requires is laziness."

"I think that comedy is the be-all and end-all."

"I think we [comedians] deal with fear more viscerally than almost anyone! I mean, you feel the audience's fear, your own fear. The whole show is about quelling fear!"

"You can't be the one who decides why you like something. It doesn't matter!"

"One of the things that bothered me about acting is that a lot of people just say they can do it and-- and can't! There's nobody in this world [of comedy] that says they can do it and can't do it."

"My first bit that I thought "That's a real bit!" was about the tramway between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. 1976: the city was going bankrupt. I go "Oh! That's great! They're putting up rides for us! Next thing, I guess they'll be putting up a rollercoaster through the ghetto!""