I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it - so I give us another 50 years.

[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so.

I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.

The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.