I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

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

You often hear that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don't get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.

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.

In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.

I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.