"It was a great pleasure to make a movie again. Nothing is better; perhaps revolution, but there you have to succeed and be right, dangers which never attach themselves to making movies, and dreaming."

"What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies."

"What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business."

"Yeah, yeah, I know I got rid of the headache. Now I got cancer."

"What you doin' with such a big ol' dog in New York?" "Never had a wife."

"Indians don't last in prison. They weren't born for it like the whites."

"Twenty-one years between first and second films is longer than any director should have to wait. The case of Polonsky is one of the most dismal hangovers from the McCarthy period."

"First of all, directing is an idea that you have of a total flow of images that are going on, which are incidentally actors, words, and objects in space. It's an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That's what directing is."

"I have a lot to be sad about. Not bitter in any way. But I think it can be fairly said that I've been in on the beginning, the rise, peak, collapse and end of the talking picture."

"I am never quite sure whether I am one of the cinema's elder statesmen or just the oldest whore on the beat."

"I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, "No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk." Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard."

"Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script."

"When they did finally see it, there was a near-riot and I was going to be lynched. And I had to go into hiding in the mountains for two weeks, until things calmed down. That's really true!"

"Mel [Gibson] will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a number."

"The village is a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is Number Six and will live there happily as Number Six for ever after. [...] And this is the one rebel that they can't break."

"A [stand-up] bit is a bar of gold. A talk-show panel story is something that's too good to throw out but not good enough to use."

"Do you know the first thing I said as a child, before I said "Mama" or "Dada"? I said "Leave me alone!" (laughs) Is that not the mantra of stand-up comedy?"

"I don't know why people always assume that the guest is more interesting than the host."

"Somebody was sayin' [somethin'] the other day about "You gotta be funny, or they'll turn on you!" [...] And I go "They should turn on you!" It's a very humbling life, at any level."

"The truth ends every conversation."

"I always feel like -- before you get a dog -- someone should take a pyramid of Alpo cans and a pyramid of dog shit, and put the dog in the middle. "Now, what we're gonna do... is you're gonna buy all of this and turn it into this. Do you still want to do this?""

"If you give someone a 50, it's a big "thing" now, where they check it quite a bit. And it's like "Well, I used it! Why can't you use it?" We're all just kind of going along with this "paper has value" scam. Right?"

"It really speaks to how bad [American] food is, that it's work."

"Comedy is the closest thing to justice. If you're funny, you survive; if you're not, you don't."

"I don't think comedy has changed, and it never will change."

"The comedy universe is a swamp of madness."

"I've figured out that the "non-event" is the best part of life."

"Have you noticed the popularity of Ultimate Fighting and The Real Housewives? These two things are two weights on the same barbell. What it is, I think, is the worst aspects of each gender exaggerated to the maximum."

"God has no rhyme or reason to who he gives a sense of humor to."

"[The comedy brain] picks up so much, except a lot of basic stuff that you need."

"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!""