When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: 'Tell about the guy who died on your show!'
Every time someone says, 'You know, we really ought to get together,' if I were really honest, I would ask 'Why?'
I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.
Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.
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.
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
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.
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 live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.
I'll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.
Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!
I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.
I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests' books.
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.
I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his '22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.
William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.
It's no fun being a specimen.
I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
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.
I'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.
I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars - and, of course, the planets.
I'm not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn't really bother me.
If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.
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?
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.
