Parents tell us things to protect us, or they educate us from their own misinformation or misconceptions.

When you're young and you first see the extent and depth of the world's hypocrisy, it's fun to go after it. But by the time you're sixty, it's so commonplace. What's the point in ridiculing people anymore? Their existence itself is a sort of sick joke.

You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.

At a certain point, you have to convince the actors that you've done the right thing. The way I work, if I can't convince them, I've got to move on. I can't coerce them or browbeat them.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.

Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.