While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.

I'll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

Great humorists are great insulters.

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, 'You saved my dad's life.'

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 don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.

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.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the people who handle it know what they are doing.

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.

Every time someone says, 'You know, we really ought to get together,' if I were really honest, I would ask 'Why?'

I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.

All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

I've actually gotten so I don't associate television with entertainment very much.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.

It was well after college that I learned about depression. I got my first job for Jack Paar. I realized I was sleeping 14 hours a day and just living for the Paar show.

My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.

I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, 'Kid, don't make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you're like David Frost. Make it a conversation.'

I had to fight the intellectual label when I started in television, because, first of all, it's not going to help you commercially, and also, it wasn't particularly true of me. I mean, if anybody thought I was an intellectual, they probably had never really seen one.

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.

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.

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!

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

Every so often, there is an article saying the old kind of talk show isn't possible now. In the oldest kind of talk show, you only had the choice of that or two other channels!