I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.

My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.

I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn't afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.

You want me to admit I'm a four-foot, six-inch freckle-faced person of Jewish extraction? I admit it. All but the extraction. But being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.

Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.

We want to get people laughing; we don't want to offend anybody.

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."