The thing is to be brave and move the audience with you, instead of cater to the lowest common denominator, you know, slipping on a banana peel and falling on your ass. You got to move the audience a little further ahead in terms of their appreciation of what is comedy. It’s complicated.
Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing.
Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.
I’m always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren’t Jewish. How could I love them so much?
Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.
A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.
Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.
I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I’m one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Critics can’t even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I’ve done, or in appreciating it. I’ve been lucky. But most of the critics don’t like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.
Basically, I’m a writer. I’m the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.
Everything starts with writing.
You cannot have fun with anything that you don’t love or admire or respect.
It’s good to be the king.
Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
I always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God.
When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.
If you’re alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.
You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.