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.

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

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.

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.

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

I get paid for what most kids get punished for.

I need the applause.

A lot of people resent that I've been in someone's life for 50 years. Why shouldn't people have an affection for me and what I've done? Didn't I have to be genuine for them to buy into what I did? There are children who grow up today who will not have that when they're 55 years old. With whom will they have it? Name an example for me.

When I would be myself, I was being big-headed. I was being egotistical. I was a megalomaniac, when it really was just having not to be a monkey for a few hours a day. And fulfilling the need to be a man.

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.

It'll keep you alive for another 10 years if you get yourself a laugh once a day: either provoke it, or look around in the wildest laboratory in the world, the public.

I've had the greatest respect for my work in this country by Americans. Critics have no brains.

I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don't get into it because I do comedy already.

I turned down 'Some Like It Hot.' See how smart I am? I felt I couldn't bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don't need to compete with the wardrobe.

My family was as absolute as the work.Family was first always.

When I'm working, I stay in ICU in any hospital that will get me a bed.

You would not believe some of the scripts I have seen. I have read something like 160 that I've rejected, and I keep them all, for posterity.

I'm an unusual man. I know that.

I don't talk about anything negative.

Marilyn Monroe was a fabulous dame - fabulous.

When I arrived in Las Vegas, I felt I was embraced by it.

Billy Crystal, Steve Martin do wonderful things.

An only child, I always wanted a large hug-house.

Every day is another something that comes along.

I think it has helped that I am so curious about what has been happening to me and that I have enjoyed watching the changes through my life, you know? I didn't know what was going to happen to me next.

My dad was a stickler for teaching me the pratfall. There is something magical about taking a good fall, and when it works, when you get that laugh, there's no better feeling in the world.

When I get an idea, I start to write like I was electrically motivated.

I want to know why the government of this country can't take care of the people who are keeping us safe?

I don't like any female comedians.

My God, the stage is the only place I know where to go.

I believe when you go out there, you have a responsibility to deliver. I have old-fashioned thinking when I'm out there.

Adrenaline is so strong that none of us understand it.

I will not say anything negative about the president of the United States. I don't do that. And I don't allow my children to do that.

The beauty of love, as far as I'm concerned, is it makes you better. It makes you stronger. It gives you direction. It gives you understanding of what life is and what we've been given.

I'm really, basically, nine, and I've always been that. I've never, ever allowed the child within me to die.

For a comic to put a public performance in jeopardy for a snickering little laugh - no, no, no, I don't believe in it.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.