George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?
As long as I don’t commit any crimes, you have no right to judge me except by my performance as a professional. On that level, you’re welcome to think whatever you want about me.
I think it’s almost immoral to keep on with a marriage that’s really bad. It just gets more and more rotten and vindictive and everybody gets more and more hurt. There’s not enough honesty about marriage, I think. I wish more people would face the truth about their marital situations.
I play my life straight – the way I see it. I’m grateful to audiences for watching me and for enjoying what I do – but I’m not one of those who believe that a successful entertainer is made by the public, as is so often said.
You become successful, the way I see it, only if you’re good enough to deliver what the public enjoys. If you’re not, you won’t have any audience; so the performer really has more to do with his success than the public does.
Entertainment is like any other major industry; it’s cold, big business. The business end wants to know one thing: Can you do the job? If you can, you’re in, you’re made; if you can’t, you’re out.
I demand my right to a private life, just as I respect that right for everybody else.
From the time I was a little kid, I was always shy. Performing was when I was outgoing. So I guess I am a loner. I get claustrophobia if a lot of people are around.
I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you. If you don’t hurt anybody else, what you do is your own business.
There’s a big difference between being a loner and being lonely. I’m far from lonely. My day is full of things I enjoy, starting with my show. Any time my work is going well and I have a relationship with a woman that’s pretty solid, that does it for me.
Money gives me just one big thing that’s really important, and that’s the freedom of not having to worry about money.
I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.
I can’t go anywhere without being bugged by somebody. I’d love to just hike out down the street, or drop in a restaurant, or wander in the park, or take my kids somewhere without collecting a trail of people. But I can’t.
Everybody I meet in public seems to want to audition for me. If I ask a guy what time it is, he’ll sing it to me.
Find me any performer anywhere who isn’t egocentric. You’d better believe you’re good, or you’ve got no business being out there.
I don’t think it’s you that changes with success – it’s the people around you who change. Because of your new status, they change in relation to you.
There’s a lot of hypocrisy in audiences. I’d never dream of telling even on a nightclub stage, let alone my show, some of the jokes that are told in a lot of the living rooms from which we get those letters!
I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits. I can’t eat but one steak at a time. I don’t want but one woman. It’s silly to have as one’s sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth.
When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.
Who cares what entertainers on the air think about international affairs? Who would want to hear me about Vietnam? They can hear all they want from people with reason to be respected as knowledgeable.
Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies – outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn’t do themselves.