I have a very primitive sense that if I just turn on a radio or the television, that somebody's playing that stuff for me.

That's an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you're fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you're not immortal and you've got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.

I'm not completely sure we aren't all living in a hallucination now.

When you're a kid, you always feel you have this weird kindred-spirit thing with other Jews, until you get older and you realize it's just middle-class bourgeois Jews that sort of fit a template that your family fits into one way or another.

What comics sacrifice and what lives they live - I know that most of their lives, their adult lives, they're sitting around or walking around with notebooks, writing things down. Usually they're fairly sensitive. Usually they're very bright. And that makes them poets.

I knew most of my radio listeners were lefty political people, and I decided definitively not to be that guy - not to address politics.

I found a great deal of relief and excitement watching comics when I was very young. My grandmother was very into them and so was my grandfather. They had a profound effect on me, so I just found myself watching comedians on the after-school shows: Merv Griffin and that kind of stuff.