I completely understand why a businessman would fire me from 'Saturday Night Live'. Because he was seeing Jay Leno kill 10 minutes a night, doing his monologue with wall-to-wall laughs and applause, then I do 10 minutes a week to, sometimes, breathtaking silence. He's just listening for the laughs.

Happiness is less regulated by external circumstances than inward enjoyment. Whoever is happy in the satisfaction of himself feels imperturbable felicity; but he, who trusts entirely to the world for the disposition of his peace, must inevitably participate [in] many privations and disappointments.

I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.

Violent people usually express their love of a thing by their hatred of its opposite.

I would love to stay at SNL forever. But you can't stay in the same place. People think you're a loser.

The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle.

There are two things which a man should scrupulously avoid: giving advice that he would not follow, and asking advice when he is determined to pursue his own opinion.