I don’t mind being 65, but nobody is gonna tell me to come in at 5:30 to have the early bird special.
Ed Sullivan brought me to TV first in 1952, then Garry Moore’s program gave me a lot of confidence and freedom.
If you want to read about love and marriage, you’ve got to buy two separate books.
My father helped me leave. He said, ‘It’s all out there, it’s not here.’
If you stop and think about it, nearly all great humor is at the expense of someone or something.
My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn’t let him cut my nails.
A summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!
Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We’re reflections. It’s a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.
The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.
I had a sympathetic role in ‘thirtysomething,’ and in two weeks I’m going to do the role again. But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It’s much more fun. Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.
Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up ‘vaudeville’ in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says ‘Milton Berle’ – and he made it just a tremendous party.
That’s the great thing about New Year’s, you get to be a year older. For me, that wasn’t such a joke, because my birthday was always around this time. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that everybody was celebrating my birthday. That’s what the trees are all about.
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
My favorite way to spend Saturday is in and out of bed, watching sports on TV and eating.
My father was a dreamer – my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady’s handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: ‘Don’t end up like me.’
If you keep yourself alive and current, funny is funny.
Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.
The ability to absorb a book and make someone else’s words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.
One thing I’ve never said in my whole life is, ‘Let’s have dinner at a Japanese restaurant.’
My son says I never tell stories about anyone who’s living.