I've always suffered from a complete inability to sense who's important.
Interviewers always used to ask me about my pageboy haircut, and it drove me nuts: it almost made me suspect that there was something strange about it. So I cut off my pageboy.
I try not to talk during the day when I have a show that night. My voice is my instrument, just like a saxophonist's instrument is his saxophone, plus also his voice, if he's the one between tunes that makes announcements.
In college I was one of six males who auditioned for five male roles in a comedy play. I was the one rejected. At that moment I made up my mind never to place myself at the mercy of some pompous, goateed, black-turtleneck-shirted "should I yay him or nay him?" pantywaist ever again.
Even the worst comic is at least somewhat entertaining, if only in a pathological way, for five minutes.
I asked the head musician if I could go onstage during the next break and he said sure. I got two laughs in twenty minutes, and walked out feeling more elated than I had ever felt in my entire life. The glory of that triumph contented me for two full years.
I've always kind of pushed the envelope in terms of trying to get away with things no one else was going near. I always thought of myself like a mouse trying to get cheese that no one else could get without getting their tail snipped off.
I've been at stand-up 26 years now: After a while, you get as jaded as the proverbial gynecologist who no longer enjoys drugging and violating his patients.
If an asteroid is coming toward you, you don't have to blow it up. You just have to slow it down long enough for our country to rotate out of the way.
The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.
I think it's good to know more than the average guy. If I'm in a bar now and some pretty girl is talking to some handsome 24-year-old man, I'll say, "Okay, who's the emperor after Caligula? What chief mistake did Marcus Aurelius make in choosing a successor?" He'll just look like an idiot. She'll just gravitate toward me, I'm thinking. It works in Detroit.
You should get married. When I was younger, I was into the fame and fortune, and now I realize that a loving wife and happy children - that's life's greatest consolation prize.
Some comedians change their style, often to their advantage; but I see no reason why I can't continue with the "urbane sophisticate" 'til the day I die.
I started doing stand-up at the age of 20. This was back in 1976, around the time (coincidence?) that the first comedy clubs were starting. The young comedians of today gasp when I tell them how many shows I did that first year: 500. Five nights a week.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: