I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.
A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, ‘You saved my dad’s life.’
Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his ’22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.
The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.
I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.
I’ll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.
Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians. And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population. But oh, how they try.
Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.
You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?’
It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves level-headed.
Great humorists are great insulters.
Every time someone says, ‘You know, we really ought to get together,’ if I were really honest, I would ask ‘Why?’
The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.
I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, ‘Kid, don’t make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you’re like David Frost. Make it a conversation.’
Bush’s “the French have no word for entrepreneur” is guaranteed immortality.
What better substitute for real love than a sea of eager faces, beaming, laughing, applauding, and celebrating your existence?
The initial delight of being spotted lasts about a week and four days.