I get paid for what most kids get punished for.

Interviews are vital, but you cannot allow an interviewer to take your life and disturb it.

There's something wonderful about taking a tag off a pair of socks, off a shirt, off a jacket. I really think that it has to do with my wanting to give myself all the perks that there are. It's part of my psychosis.

We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.

My ego and my vanities have nothing to do with comedy.

I would not want to do one-episode television - that's just a brief encounter with your audience. The arc takes the actor into an arena where he can really stretch.

If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.

People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.

I'm really not thick-skinned - my wife will tell you that I take sunsets personally - but I know that I've got the belly for whatever comes down the pike. I think it's tenacity. You've been there before, and you just have to recall, 'How did I handle that one?'

When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff.

When you're 89, dementia develops. I mean, I've told a story onstage, and I'm telling it with a full heart, and I forgot the damn punch line.

Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.

Seeing a woman project the kind of aggression that you have to project as a comic just rubs me wrong.

Turning 90 is not for sissies.

This is the pain pacemaker. I've got a battery under my skin. From that battery are two electrodes that go into the spine where they cut bone away to accommodate it. Now I put on the power here. If I have the pain, the stimulator starts. It's tingling, like when your foot falls asleep, you know?

Red is uplifting.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.

If I was performing, I had no pain. But you can't stay on stage 24 hours a day.

When you get a question like, 'Did you like meeting Her Majesty?' 'No, I thought she was a slob.' I mean, what are you going to say... The mischief comes into me when I'm doing a Q&A, I'm 9 years old again. I don't get mad. I do get offended.

Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.

From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems.

You think about getting old, but when you get there, it's not what you thought it would be.

I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have and I never will. I'm an entertainer for 75 years.