My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

There wasn't a funeral per se. I buried [Gilda Radner] 3 miles from her house that she had bought just shortly before we met. It was an old house, old colonial house, 1734. And there were just a few friends at the funeral, a nonsectarian cemetery. And an old friend of hers from junior high school or high school was the rabbi in town, and he performed the service.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Zero Mostel wasn't afraid of authority in any form, and that's the part that influenced me the most.

Gene Wilder characters wanted to be calm, but to the great delight of audiences, they rarely succeeded.

My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.