I remain convinced that I can be a true universalist only when I am a better Jew.

You can't expect the entire world to come to New York to see you. You have to travel to them.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. To me it was meaningless. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sings about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

I do prefer the stage. It's really the granddaddy of them all.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

You always draw on your experiences with live audiences to know how to do comedy on films. You're working for a laugh that may or may not come six months later, but you're working in a vacuum at the time you are doing it.

On the stage you're there, it's live. There's a beginning, a middle, an end. When something is funny you hear it right away.