Comedian

Adrenaline is so strong that none of us understand it.

Gambling is part of the human condition. I love it. I have the best time gambling. I've been winning fortunes, and I've been losing them.

Adrenaline is wonderful. It covers pain. It covers dementia. It covers everything.

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.

I got the 'Max Rose' script, and I fell in love with it. It just hit me. It was something that needed to be made.

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

I have always said that I cannot allow the child within me to die. It's kept me alive.

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

I can't stand to ask anyone, 'How was that?'

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?

I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'

I almost get annoyed at the fact that I'm not going to use all that I got.

The connection between pathos and broad comedy is very tight. But you do far more work in a comedy scene than you do in a straight scene. It's much harder.

You can ask me anything you want. That doesn't mean I'm going to answer you.

That never stops. That's what drives you: the joy and excitement of doing what you love.

The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.

I really am opinionated, but not for long. I have found myself coming off of what I think of something because the guy I'm talking to makes better sense than I am. I have so many points of view, I can't keep track of 'em, because I talk to too many people... I'm not so opinionated that I won't budge.

I expect people that come to the studio to work to come with the same energy I come with. If I see less than that, I get very strong about, if you want to do this, come with a sense of pride, come with eagerness and anxiety.

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.

I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have, and I never will.