Jonathan Winters Quotes

I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated. I don't do anything the same every day.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.

God is in my head, but the devil is in my pants.

Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

I have never pretended to be any kind of super-religious kind of man, but I feel very strongly that you can be funny without being dirty.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.

I have a photographic memory; I just haven't developed it yet.

Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.

I've always been proud of being a Marine. I won't hesitate to defend the Corps.

When you wear so many hats in society, you never know who you are. That's the beauty of it. Because once you find out who you are, you're screwed.

I may not be playing with a full deck but I don't need a full deck. I have four aces.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

My mother had a radio show - a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.

I know you can be funny without being filthy.

Throughout my life, I've been gratified that I've been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.

I was talking to a businessman, and I said, Don't you think most men are little boys? And he said, I'm no little boy! I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And I said, Well, the way I look at it - you just have bigger toys.

I was always an observer, even as a child. I could be satisfied to sit in a car for 3 hours and just look at the street go by while my mother went shopping.

Well, the most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning - it's a man or a woman without a sense of humor.

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.