Jack Benny, Fred Allen. Their jokes were wonderful. It takes skill to be funny. The timing of Jack Benny was so fine. It is a form of genius for which we should be grateful.

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

The artist makes his living by pretending, by putting it in a meaningful hole though no such holes exist.