My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.

In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you're stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, 'Hey, you're great! What's your name again?'

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing - nothing at all or in any way - be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

It's no fun being a specimen.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.

I'll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

Great humorists are great insulters.

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, 'You saved my dad's life.'

It's a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.