You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

I was a Political Science major.

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.

When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there's a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he's still taping.

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.

Despite the success cult men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.

Would that the Roman people had but one neck!

The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.

and we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

There have been many Buddhas before me and will be many Buddhas in the future.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

Ask him what time it is and he'll tell you how the watch was made.

If I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution.

Marriage, children-you never expect it to end in tragedy. Unless you're me.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.