"If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books."
"Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers."
"You do live longer with bran, but you spend the last fifteen years on the toilet."
"Banks have a new image. Now you have 'a friend,' your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens?"
"Modesty is not one of my virtues."
"Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We're reflections. It's a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it."
"You only live once, except for Shirley MacLaine."
"My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn't let him cut my nails."
"The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life."
"Did you hear the one about the elderly Jew on his deathbed who sent for a priest, after declaring to his astonished relatives that 'I want to convert.' Asked why he would become a Catholic, after living all his life as a Jew, he answered: 'Better one of them should die than one of us.'"
"I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify."
"It's not easy being a father, but I've been allowed a comeback."
"As a parent, I'd - I'd be a better father."
"I made it, Ma - Carnegie Hall. And I didn't have to practice."
"We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator... Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or 'stage' Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke."
"Let's face it: It's difficult enough to be funny without worrying about what is going to offend whom."
"If you stop and think about it, nearly all great humor is at the expense of someone or something."
"Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party."
"Right when I started in show... Milton Berle was my first idol. When I was a kid, I went to see Milton at Lowe's State, and I never laughed so much, and I said, 'That's who I want to be; that's what I want to be.'"
"I'm only... I'm only unhappy when the reviews are bad, but give me a good review and I'm a... I'm just screaming all over the place with joy."
"And humor has always been a weapon. You want to get even on somebody? You want to attack somebody? Make fun of them."
"When I was in the hospital they gave me apple juice every morning, even after I told them I didn't like it. I had to get even. One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, 'It's a little cloudy.' I took the tube from her and said, 'Let me run it through again,' and drank it. The nurse fainted."
"There's a charm, there's a rhythm, there's a soul to Jewish humor. When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, 'You're doing a Jewish act.'"
"The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage."
"When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about."
