Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.

People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

Very strange people, physicists, " he said as soon as they were outside again. "In my experience the ones who aren't actually dead are in some way very ill.

Elvis is the soul of discretion.

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

A student will send me an urgent appeal to hear her, saying she is poor and wants my advice as to whether it is worth while to continue her studies. I invariably refuse such requests.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

The Western world is ... looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And Sept. 11 is an occasion for me to realize it even more.

The charges of the hysterics are revealed for what they are: castles in the air built on misrepresentation, supported by unfounded fear, held aloft by hysteria.

Television is a passivity.

I just watched cartoons for three years, and that had a strong affect on me.

By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.

The first time I went to see a Second City show, I was in awe of everything. I just wanted to touch the same stage that Gilda Radner had walked on. It was sacred ground.