Johnny Carson Quotes

Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often.

When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.

Talent alone won't make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: 'Are your ready?'

Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead.

Some sad news from Australia... the inventor of the boomerang grenade died today.

Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.

Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whiskey, and a dog to eat the rare steak.

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

Never ask your wife if she still hears from her old pimp.

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.

The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.

Happiness is.....finding two olives in your martini when youre hungry.

Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.

When turkeys mate they think of swans.

My success just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each day.

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.

George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.

Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?

Happiness is being stuck in an elevator and discovering the ravishing blonde with you is a liquor salesman with a case of samples.

According to statistics, it's a lot easier to get hit by lightning than to win a Lotto jackpot. The good side: you don't hear from your relatives.

Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.

We resort, frankly, to pies, which is a comedy staple that's gone back, I guess, to since the first pie was ever baked.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

I work because I enjoy what I'm doing, and the fact that I make money at it - big money - is a fine-and-dandy side fact.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

It was so hot today that Burger King was singing, "if you want it your way, cook it yourself".

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money.

A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.

People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized.

I hear that whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.

Money gives me just one big thing that's really important, and that's the freedom of not having to worry about money.

Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions.

I wouldn't have the slightest interest in running for public office. I'd rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.

There was this billy goat at a movie studio who found and ate a can of film. When a nanny asked him how he liked it, he said, "It was all right but I liked the book better."

Happiness is seeing the muscular lifeguard all the girls were admiring leave the beach hand in hand with another muscular lifeguard.

Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.

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.

I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.

If God didn't want man to hunt, He wouldn't have given us plaid shirts.