Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.

It’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

I don't understand why very, very rich people want to have even more money than they've already got.

The most creative people have learned to tolerate the slight discomfort of indecision for much longer and so, just because they put in more pondering time, their solutions are more creative.

It's easier to be creative if you've got other people to play with.

Either people walk round dressed as chickens or they listen to Beethoven.

When people quote sketches to me, half the time I don't know what they're talking about so I have to sort of go, aha, yes, oh yep, I remember that and lie my way out of it.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

Laughter destroys any divisions between people.

When people say 'I'm not a prude, but ...' what they mean is 'I am a prude, and ...'.

I started to make harder jokes before anyone else did. And the producers would get anxious. They'd say, 'That's a little bit hard-edged, isn't it?' And I'd say, 'Let's just try it and see how the audience reacts. If they don't like it, let's cut it out.' And the audience roared with laughter, so I learned you could do this harder humor and people loved it.

I've always found life quite difficult to explain to people or to myself.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

Other people, you know, put a latex rubber on, you know, to become sexually excited. There's so much I don't understand.

Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

I think there are so many activities going on, like mountaineering. You know, you would pay good money not to have to do that, and yet there are people racing out who want to spend their spare time clambering up rocks.

I think the hard thing for young comedians is that the majority of the young people in the audience out there don't have the wide range of references.

There's so many good people producing wine now, ... It's just amazing. There's so much on the shelves. You don't have to go buy those overpriced wines.

I think that sometimes you do something that makes a small group of people laugh, which is all we were trying to do; we were just trying to make each other laugh.

It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that.

I'm always meeting new people, and my list of friends seems to change quite a bit.

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

The most creative people have this childlike facility to play.