The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

All those who believe in psychokinesis – raise my hand.

I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.

I was extremely lucky that I had two great wives. It sounds a bit funny to say that, but it’s absolutely true.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don’t meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it’s essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you’re going to be an actor.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I never wanted to be Marilyn – it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.

I like quips. I like whiffs of cynicism and I think they can be witty. But I don’t really know where wittiness is constructive.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

Reality is a sliding door.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

I love WWE, and I love that platform. There is no other platform in the world that gives me that instant gratification. There is just no other platform.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

Seeing a live Kenny Chesney show, you know what you’re going to get. You know it’s going to be an all-day party.

I’ll be like Bob Hope, touring when I’m 100.

Disneyland is the star, everything else is in the supporting role.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

When Jerry Springer thinks you’ve gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far.

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.

I mean, families are weird.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

I’ve never seen myself as a star. I never call myself a celebrity or a superstar, whatever.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

I don’t watch television and I rarely go to the cinema, but I recently watched ‚The King’s Speech‘ on a flight. It was so beautiful and so simple.