American Quotes

I never read the tabloids.

I know it's a cliche, but the whole family is just whacked. I mean, we're all out of our minds. They're the funniest, most eccentric bizarre people I've ever met, my siblings.

I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I'm always in character.

I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn't afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.

I had auditioned for 'Saturday Night Live' two or three times before and never really saw myself there. I looked up to Belushi and Bill Murray and Aykroyd and I never saw myself as in their world.

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I couldn't do any of my other characters, you know? But I could have done the lady. Church Lady's Malibu Beach party is an idea I have for a movie, too. Yes.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that.

I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.

Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.

Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible.

There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.

When our thoughts - which bring actions - are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be.

If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

Women are not totally nauseous after seeing me.