You can't be satirical and not be offensive to somebody.

If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.

There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.

Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

I have always found it interesting... that there are people who regard copyright infringement as a form of flattery.

Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you.

My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.

One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money.

Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff.

I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.

Pirates could happen to anyone.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?

It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

...reality, the name we give to the common experience.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

Give us this day our daily mask.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.