"Well, I don't know how astute I am, but I did want to be a journalist when I was growing up."

"Funny is funny. I dare anyone to look at Tim Conway and Harvey Korman doing the dentist sketch, which is more than 40 years old, and not scream with laughter."

"I think the hardest thing to do in the world, show-business-wise, is write comedy."

"Ask anyone who's successful how they got there, you're going to hear a different story."

"My favorite is doing the television show, as a variety show, every week. If the show wasn't that great one week, we could always come back and apologize, you know?"

"I very much enjoyed doing 'Law & Order,' playing a killer - that was fun, and they had a family feel around the set, so it was a happy show to do even though the subject matter was quite the opposite."

"I loved doing 'The Family' with Eunice and Mama. They were very interesting because there were no jokes written into those sketches. It was all character-driven. And sometimes it got a little heavy."

"My favourite comedian, of course, is Tim Conway. He has a way about him - being that belly-laugh kind of funny, and he has the improvisational skills, too. I've never seen anybody better."

"I've always been able to recount things, and I have a really good memory about dialog and what people have said before and this and that."

"It costs a lot to sue a magazine, and it's too bad that we don't have a system where the losing team has to pay the winning team's lawyers."

"I'm not always optimistic. You wouldn't have all cylinders cooking if you were always like Mary Poppins."

"Because of YouTube, I'm getting fan mail from 10-year-olds and teenagers and college kids."

"I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me."

"I am not a person who yells at all, but I realized that I have always felt so good after doing the Tarzan yell, after doing Charo, or screaming as Eunice."

"I was kind of shy as a kid. I was a pretty good student. I was a wallflower, or nerd, if you will."

"What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters."

"I'm really not that funny in real life! But I am the best audience one could find. I love to laugh."

"I'm glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie. The networks just wouldn't spend the money today."

"I was in California, and I was going to UCLA, and I knew I certainly didn't have movie star looks. I remember seeing pictures and photos of Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, who were kind of average looking. I said, 'Well, that's for me, then, to go back to New York and try to be in musical comedy on Broadway.'"

"When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?'"

"In the beginning, my mother humored me when I told her I wanted to be a reporter."

"It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort."

"It is my belief that one's salary is between an individual and the IRS."

"Many senators have developed a canny sense of what will play best for the audience."

"Men still control the news, both on and off camera."

"Mistakes are not always the result of someone's ineptitude."

"My current goal is to place a moratorium on goals."

"My goal was to be a network correspondent by the time I was 30."

"My most lucrative job in college was a stint as the regional Dodge Girl."

"Never refuse an assignment except when there is a conflict of interest, a potential of danger to you or your family, or you hold a strongly biased attitude about the subject under focus."

"Every time I am in danger of believing the glamour of my own press, some incident inevitably brings me back to earth."

"For every two minutes of glamour, there are eight hours of hard work."

"How valuable NBC Magazine was in my career is questionable."

"I don't exactly know what it means to be ready. A cake when the oven timer goes off? Am I fully baked, or only half-baked?"

"I hadn't realized until I covered the police beat just how seedy crime is."

"I very much wanted to be accepted by my peers, to be considered a serious journalist."

"I worked half my life to be an overnight success, and still it took me by surprise."

"In every interview I have ever read or seen or taken part in, the final question in our future-oriented society is always, What next?"

"In interviews I gave early on in my career, I was quoted as saying it was possible to have it all: a dynamic job, marriage, and children. In some respects, I was a social adolescent."

"In real life, events seem much less dramatic."

"Women may not have it easy, but we are given a fairer chance to reach for the top."

"No matter how many goals you have achieved, you must set your sights on a higher one."

"I have had a lifelong phobia of snakes."

"Women didn't want to watch other women on television because they were jealous of their husbands' diverted attention."

"A fact of modern life is that it takes women longer to get ready than men."

"A press card does not provide you with an invisible shield. You're flesh and blood."

"Although I was entirely relaxed on camera, if I had to stand up and say something to an assembled group of people, I was rendered all but inarticulate."

"Anyone who writes an autobiographical work at the age of 34 is, at best, presumptuous. It occurred to me that it was time to set the record straight."

"Being a novelty had its advantages."

"By far my most perilous assignment was covering a tank car explosion."