Your financial cost can best be figured out when you realize that if you were to devote the same time and energy to business instead of gold, you would be a millionaire in approximately six weeks.

My wife said to me, "I want to be cremated." I said, "How about Tuesday?"

When I do an hour-and-a-half show, if I don't improvise 20 minutes worth of new material each night, I feel I've let myself down.

What makes a comedian has nothing to do with religion. Think of Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, who were all Catholics.

Ya know, if you treat every comic the way you treated me tonight, you would never see a bad show.

You want to know what makes me tick, I'll tell you what makes me tick. I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn; I read a two-penny magazine called 'The Hawk's Nest.' Nobody entered that nest that didn't leave a little richer and a little wiser. And that 11-year-old boy said, 'Isn't that a wonderful thing.' And that's all there is to it.

Ninety-nine percent is in the delivery. If you have the right voice and the right delivery, you're cocky enough, and you pound down on the punch line, you can say anything and make people laugh maybe three times before they realize you're not telling jokes.