Quote collection
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"Suddenly, I was thirty, very unhappy entertaining people in their forties, and here came a group of people in their teens and twenties who had similar anti-authority problems and similar dreams and wishes, hopes for mankind. So I gravitated toward them."
"I set out to become a comedian, and I said in order to do that the first thing I'll do is become a disc jockey and know my pop music. I like it, my voice is good, and I can start out getting confidence without an audience in front of me."
"When I was in seventh grade, I was caught stealing money from the visiting team's locker room during a basketball game. So I was sent to The Brothers. That's what they called this parochial school up in Goshen, New York. I was supposed to get closer supervision there and more "masculine influence," whatever that means. But I was thrown out for telling a couple of really lame kids on the playground that I had heroin."
"To me the cynics are the ones in the boardrooms with the reports from the focus groups."
"I'm certainly a skeptic. I always quibble with people."
"Have you noticed when you wear a hat for a long time it feels like it's not there anymore? And then when you take it off it feels like it's still there?"
"I was trying to get out of the night clubs and was thinking maybe I'll go to the colleges now; that's where you can speak your mind."
"It's difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too."
"Lenny Bruce genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry."
"I hope I'm beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it'll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be...well, that's for others to judge."
"If you have a legal problem, guess how you determine whether or not you need a lawyer. You see a lawyer. Isn't that weird?"
"No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open."
"When I listen to those tapes now, the real cocaine shows; there's just nothing special about their content."
"I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens."
"I loved the angiogram. They stick a thing in your thigh and it goes all the way up to your heart. Isn't that a thrill? Well, at least the nurse scored thigh."
"Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage. I've always written in the long format, five, eight, 10-minute pieces rather than one-liners, so since writing books, the process hasn't changed much. A piece in my live routine can end up as part of one of my HBO specials, and it can also end up in one of the books."