Be so good they can't ignore you.

You know, there's a moment when you're famous when it's unbearable to go out because you're too famous. And then there's a moment when you're famous just right.

I always think back to my high school days and realize all the people who were so popular then are nowhere now and all the people who were steadfast and steady-going are somewhere. So high school doesn't necessarily translate to later in life.

Talent is the ability to say things well, but genius is the ability to, well, say things.

I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.

Comedy may be big business but it isn't pretty.