I've always loved songwriting, and I vowed to be a songwriter like Cole Porter when I was only 9 years old.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

I don't know what to say so I'll just say what's in my heart...badoom, badoom, badoom.

One of the maxims of the new field of conservation biological control is that to control insect herbivores, you must maintain populations of insect herbivores.

Romantic comedies are particularly hard to make.

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

The greatest victory is the one over oneself.

It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

In another life - and as I like to say, another body - I used to teach aerobics.

But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago.

Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference.

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.