I've had great success being a total idiot.
You can ask me anything you want. That doesn't mean I'm going to answer you.
We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.
A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.
I need the applause.
The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.
I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'
From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems.
I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have and I never will. I'm an entertainer for 75 years.
When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff.
Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.
If you're an old pro, you know how well you're doing when you're doing it, and your inner government spanks you if you're not doing well.
I really am opinionated, but not for long. I have found myself coming off of what I think of something because the guy I'm talking to makes better sense than I am. I have so many points of view, I can't keep track of 'em, because I talk to too many people... I'm not so opinionated that I won't budge.
I've had the greatest respect for my work in this country by Americans. Critics have no brains.
People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.
I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.
My family was as absolute as the work.Family was first always.
When you're doing a different kind of film, you have to bring a different kind of attitude; you have to bring a different kind of concentration.
When I'm working, I stay in ICU in any hospital that will get me a bed.
I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have, and I never will.
I'm really not thick-skinned - my wife will tell you that I take sunsets personally - but I know that I've got the belly for whatever comes down the pike. I think it's tenacity. You've been there before, and you just have to recall, 'How did I handle that one?'
Turning 90 is not for sissies.
You would not believe some of the scripts I have seen. I have read something like 160 that I've rejected, and I keep them all, for posterity.
The film I did with Bobby De Niro, 'The King of Comedy' - an awful lot came to me out of that movie because De Niro never allowed me any room to be crazy. If I had tried to play it the way I would normally play it and get hysterical, Bobby would punch me.
I'm an unusual man. I know that.
I don't talk about anything negative.
When I arrived in Las Vegas, I felt I was embraced by it.
Billy Crystal, Steve Martin do wonderful things.
I was once six feet tall, but at 85, I'm now five feet four.
I almost resent being Charley Moviestar. Yeah, I'm grateful. But it takes me away from my kids.
