It never was my plan to get into television.
I like a real beach. A crowded one, you know? People, towels, umbrellas. I hate those little private strips of sand you see up in Malibu.
It is kind of funny that the people who don't think Hillary Clinton is fit and healthy enough to be president are so worried that Hillary Clinton is fit and healthy enough to be president.
Sometimes I'll feel like an interview was fine or whatever, and people go, 'Oh, boy, I saw you with so and so last night; that must have been tough.' And then I'm like, 'I guess it was bad. I need to look back at that.'
I have had a lot of experience in broadcasting.
I never imagined being on television.
I did not have any delusions of grandeur as a kid.
I still love comic books. When you have a kid, that's an excuse to keep reading all the comic books.
People's lives are boring.
You don't need to exorcise your personal demons onstage.
I don't really need to be dirty to be funny.
I know there are, like, 12 rules for late night: a desk, a band. Will people take me seriously if I don't wear a tie?
I can't be as flip as I once was.
My aunt and uncle are clearly civilians.
I have like fifteen televisions in my house.
I only get unusual ailments.
I definitely feel pressure to keep slim. I don't want to be the guy who lost weight and gained it all back. But it's hard. Sometimes I'll gorge and gain nine pounds in a weekend somehow, and I get bummed about it.
I don't eat two days a week. And people are fascinated by it, but it works. If you cut two days of food out of your life you will lose weight.
There is no way, if I was running ABC, I would have kept me on the air.
The truth is, we have this idea that late night is about creativity and being cool, but that's not our job. Our job is to get as many people watching the commercials in between our show. That's the reality of it.
When you know someone you can make a little more fun of them without them getting offended.
I describe myself as a human being.
On Letterman and Leno, it always bothers me when they go outside the studio and it's daytime.
I'm a creative consultant, whatever that means.
I'm a terrible golfer.
No matter who it is, I hate to see people losing their jobs. I really do.
My definition of cursing is probably different from what other people's definitions are.
Almost every week, someone's mad at me.
At the Emmys, you've got a bunch of people who are used to being on TV on TV. You don't have that at the Oscars. At the Oscars, you have people who are used to having 40 takes.
If I have one criticism of the other late-night shows, it's that they're almost entirely scripted.
The idea that you would not only exercise but that you would enjoy it is very difficult for me to understand. I just hate it.
If you want to do a talk show on network television, you're probably going to wind up having a desk and a band, wearing a suit, and having a sidekick. Audiences want to feel comfortable.
Real emotion is good - or doing a good job of faking real emotion.
I go to Costco every weekend. It's my favorite part of the week.
That's my main flaw: I always think authority figures or my boss is going to think something I do is funny. And usually they don't.
It's funny how all of this has worked out - I wasn't popular in high school, but now every drunken guy in the United States wants to be my pal. They all want to buy me a shot, and pretty soon I'm throwing up.
I try hard not to repeat myself and not to do material other people are doing. We transcribe every other late-night show to make sure there's no similarity.
No matter what Sarah Palin and these geniuses she surrounds herself with try to tell you, climate change is not a liberal versus conservative thing, but the people who profit from ignoring it want you to believe it is.
You can say Pizza Hut is terrible pizza, but they also sell more pizzas than anybody else.
There's an air of mystery around the Masons, but the reality is that they're mostly a bunch of veterans getting drunk in a lodge that they've built to look like a temple. It's just a bunch of guys trying to get away from their wives.
I'm always looking to the next thing. There are always hurdles, whether it's the White House dinner or hosting charity events or that night's show: Until they're over, I worry, then I move right on to the next thing. It's hard for me to enjoy the moment. I'm just thinking about not failing.
Our politicians debate this, but our scientists don't. A huge majority of climate scientists say climate change is happening. They say we're causing it and we need to do something about it before it has a terrible effect on all of us.
I started doing a half-hour Sunday night talk show on college radio station KUNV. That excited me more than anything I'd ever done. I went through the Yellow Pages to find people who seemed interesting. I'd goof on these people, but they were so excited to be on the radio that they didn't even notice.
I know people who have literally quit their jobs to spend more time with their children, and I go, 'Wow,' my dad used to go to work at 7 o'clock in the morning and he'd come back at 7:30 and we'd kind of see him walk in and then he'd go upstairs and suddenly he'd be in a T-shirt and grumpy. There wasn't much in the way of conversation that went on.
I do have a treadmill desk in my office, and for a while, I would walk on it while checking email and going through jokes. I haven't walked on it in probably four months. Now it's more of an upright dining table for me. At some point, moss will grow over it, birds will build nests, and nature will reclaim the treadmill as its own.
When I was on the radio, I used to be able to go a lot farther than I can now. You don't really remember until you're on the radio again, sometimes in your old radio station and sitting with the guys you used to work with and you go, 'Oh yeah, I can't say these things anymore. I'm handcuffed.'
There's no debate about the greenhouse effect, just like there's no debate about gravity. If someone throws a piano off the roof, I don't care what Sarah Palin tells you, get out of the way because it's coming down on your head.
On Monday and Thursday, I eat fewer than 500 calories a day; then I eat like a pig for the other five days. You 'surprise' the body: keep it guessing. I got the idea from a BBC documentary about this Indian man who seemed about 138 years old and said his secret was severe calorie restriction.
Almost half our representatives in Washington apparently know more about science than our scientists. Or they pretend to, because big corporations give them a lot of money to make sure they can keep doing the destructive things that they do.
Producer Michael Davies - who did 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' - offered me a TV show, but I turned it down. I wasn't negotiating: It just didn't sound like a good idea. Then he offered me another show, and I said, 'No thanks' again. When I heard about 'Win Ben Stein's Money,' I thought, 'OK, that sounds like a good idea.'
The Republican National Convention is a great place to hear people talk about politics and values and all that sort of thing. But there's one thing brings me back year after year, and that's white people dancing. The RNC is the world's premier Caucasian amateur dance festival.
