The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world like dust.

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and embarrassment. They are the pollen in the air we breathe.

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do anything, try anything, expose yourself to anything — staying in motion because sooner or later those ripples will cause change.

Liked was the kiss of death. Loved or hated interested him. At least the performer had aroused emotion.

I said, Is there! I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a crusade with me to strip life down to what really is true.

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back to you.

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you can have a key made.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.