Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was in awe of my father. His generosity was beyond anything I ever could imagine. The reason I say he's like Don Corleone is he was always breaking off hundreds. I'd be like, 'Hey Dad, I'm going to McDonald's with my friends,' and he'd just whip out a hundred: 'Here, go, have fun.'
My mother was very wary at first. And now she's come around 180 degrees. She's, like, one of my biggest fans now. Like, she'll come over to my house, and she'll be like, 'OK, listen. I need two T-shirts from the comedy show, and give me three DVDs. The neighbors are asking for them.'
Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.
A friend gave me a drug for attention deficit disorder, because he's afflicted, but I'm not. So what happened to me is I suddenly had an extra-long attention span. People would tell me a story, and it would end, and I'd get all mad. "Come on, man, there has to be more to that story."
Movies are grander, with (in my experience) more heavy weight chefs in the kitchen: the studio, the producers, the writers. All of them get to weigh in and you have to listen to all of them because they hired you. With TV, it's a way smaller scale, with only a few people weighing in.
What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.
Speaking of happy successes, after years of struggling to lose those few extra pounds every mother puts on during adoption, particularly when the doctor orders bed rest, in 2004 I sent my assistant to the Gap in dark glasses with a fake ID to purchase my first pair of Easy Fit jeans.
When I go to work, I don't want to make depressing, gritty, urban stories that are depressing to watch. I want to give people something to enjoy. When people think I'm a control freak and an ogre - which I am - it's only because I want my work to be accessible and Everyman, in a way.
Car-essential is a real turn-off to me, so yeah, I just want a friendly holiday resort with a villa and a pool, but which is really private, but there again, there's a supermarket and a doctor's and a beach a five-minute walk away. That's all I want, and it's quite difficult to find.
When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt - for obvious reasons - that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came back my catch phrase was "nothing goes right." Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes.
I read in the 'Daily Mail' that I'm one of these 'foul-mouthed comedians.' But I'm much cleaner than the people they like. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to think that a 70-year-old - particularly someone like Alan Bennett - would like it, because they've seen a lot of stuff.
Even if you have an ADA room, every disability is so different that people need different things. A lot of times they'll put something on the toilet to make it higher, and for someone transferring from their chair that's fine, but I transfer from the floor so it causes more problems.
Black people don't hijack planes, alright? Now I'll be the first to admit, we steal a lot of stuff, but we do not hijack planes. In fact, in the history of aviation, a black person has never even attempted to hijack a plane. Do you want to know why? Because you can't sell an airplane.
My sister just had a baby, a little newborn. The kid is adorable, so cute. She wouldn't let me hold him, she refuses. She says, 'No way, Anthony, I'm afraid you're gonna drop him.' I'm 32 years old. Like I'm some kind of idiot. Like I don't have a million other ways to hurt that baby.
I've come across people referring to themselves as 'Vine famous.' Some of them started out by putting up Vines just for fun, then all of a sudden they get a bunch of fans, and a week later their Vines are totally different. They become obsessed with how their videos will be perceived.
My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he was also an Edwardian spiritualist researcher who was very interested in what was going on in the invisible world, the survival of the consciousness, precipitated paintings, mediumship, and trans-channeling.
I was doing gigs to stay alive. I worked two or three jobs at a time, there were times when I stayed up for 36 hours straight. I slept in shopping mall parking lots. A stand-up gig paid $35; then I could eat for another few days until the next gig. Literally, I was performing to live.
I call it 'new forms'. When you're starting out, they ask you to do four or five minute sets, but once you're a headliner, you do like 90 minutes. I try to think of different things to divvy up the show, like doing drawings, playing music... I gotta carry the show, that's the problem.
I met a new girl at a barbecue, very pretty, a blond I think. I don't know, her hair was on fire, and all she talked about was herself. You know these kind of girls: 'I'm hot. I'm on fire. Me, me, me.' You know. 'Help me, put me out.' Come on, could we talk about me just a little bit?
The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.
I hope what's different for not only the channel 'It's Grace' 2014, but for the brand overall, is I hope to continue to expand into other areas of creative content and original content. We have 'Camp Takota' coming out on Valentine's Day - we're all so pumped for it! It's so exciting!
A cigar makers organization once said that I was the most famous cigar smoker in the world. I dont know if thats true, but once while visiting Havana, I went to a cigar factory. There were four hundred people there rolling cigars, and when they saw me, they all stood up and applauded.
The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.
Getting into Sundance is a certain sort of passport to a level of anxiety I've never experienced, even having had a baby in the NICU for a week. For about ten minutes, you're a world-class director. Then you become an entry-level, harried, low level concierge with absolutely no juice.
Regular people are the problem. It's not the government, it's not the invasive Big Brother, it's the fact that we're a nation of snitches and nosey people who then cry when somebody wants our personal information. I'm talking about people who are being voyeuristic to people's privacy.
I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.
The last jobs I had were fixing cars and covering football games for a local access tv station. As in driving the mobile van to the field, setting up 3 cameras, teaching depressed grownups and interns how to use them and directing the game from the van and then wanting to kill myself.
It's not all about love. That's half of it... The other half is about that moment you have with yourself when you're looking in the mirror, and you just go, 'Oh man. I'm going to compromise my dreams, get fat, sick, old and die someday. I kind of want to have someone around for that.'
I found a great deal of relief and excitement watching comics when I was very young. My grandmother was very into them and so was my grandfather. They had a profound effect on me, so I just found myself watching comedians on the after-school shows: Merv Griffin and that kind of stuff.
I was lucky. I always had really great friends in my personal life, people always just knew who I was. It wasn't until I was in show business where that sort of changed or shifted at first. I have always had a great support network. I have had a lot of really wonderful, close friends.
Anyone who's gotten their passport in America will tell you, when you get it, it still says what country you were born in. So I remember getting my American passport. I was like, 'Woo-hoo! I'm going to travel.' And I opened it up. It said, 'Born in Iran.' I'm like, 'Oh, come on, man!'
I loved 'Dungeons & Dragons.' Actually, not so much the actual playing as the creation of characters and the opportunity to roll twenty-sided dice. I loved those pouches of dice Dungeon Masters would trundle around, loved choosing what I was going to be: warrior, wizard, dwarf, thief.
I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn't be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article "Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I'm So Drunk."
Elia Kazan. He wrote my favorite book about filmmaking, 'Elia Kazan: On Directing.' There is a thing in the book that I do every time, it's part of my production structure. He said when you're hiring an actor, ask them what draws them to the project, and don't lead them to the answer.
The biggest obstacle I've had to overcome is loving myself 100%. And that's still a battle. I love myself, but sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. And I think I've been my worst enemy in life, because others haven't been able to do anything to me unless I allowed them to do it.
I am deeply saddened to hear that the man who murdered my brother, Michael Ensley, has been charged with murder again. I grieve for every family who has been victimized by this heinous individual. My prayers and love go out to the family of Demetra Doyle Heard during this trying time.
As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.
Overall, I just love performing so much that when I write, I want to write for me. I kind of learned that on 'Mr. Show,' that even in an environment where you can write whatever you want - which is what that environment was - I realized, 'Man, I still want to be the guy out in front.'
I really love to be with people. It's nice, that. To have achieved sudden intimacy with strangers is perhaps the most human thing you can do. We all love our friends and families, as much as we hate them. When you can achieve intimacy with strangers, it's very exciting and heartening.
I buy water at the liquor store across the street from where I live. So I'm walking into the door, and standing, loitering, outside the door is a man. And I walk by him to go in, and he says, "I want pussy!" Now, I don't want to seem conceited or anything, but he was talking about me!
The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
There's something about being in front of a live audience that's fun. It's a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can't get it anywhere else. And I've been doing it since I was 23, so it's part of my being - it's part of my fabric as a person.
Women are brilliant. Every woman knows how to do the weirdest thing right out of the bucket. Every woman knows how to do that Hindu head wrap with the towel out of the shower. A typhoon couldn't blow that thing off their heads. Ever try to do that? You look like a drunk Iraqi soldier.
I'm not supporting nor not supporting TV casting shows - there is no doubt they are created for financial reasons - but I don't have a problem with wanting to sell tickets, and if you want to do an arena version of a rock musical, you have to sell a lot of tickets to justify the cast.
Last time I went Intercity there were a couple across the aisle having sex. Of course, this being a British train, nobody said anything. Then they finished, they both lit up a cigarette and this woman stood up and said, Excuse me, I think you'll find this is a non-smoking compartment.
By the time kids are 15, they're drunks and they're drug addicts and they're getting chicks pregnant. The parents wonder, "What did I do wrong?" What you did wrong was, you were never there. You had the kid as a status symbol, that's what went wrong. And you're paying the price for it.
My friend taught me this one. You take the heel of your hand, you can shove someone's nose right through their brain. I can't even watch someone blow their nose. If I'm in a fight, I'm not gonna be shoving or poking, I'm gonna be running or begging - that's my two choices, right there.
I'm a big fan of PlayStation 4. I like watching movies, TV shows, comedy specials, and listening to comedy albums and music. I'm also a big fan of getting coffee with a friend or catching up on the phone with people I've known for years, people who keep me grounded, who knew me before.
That was one of the amazing things about Doctor Who. Considering it is such an enormous charabanc, a centerpiece of international TV, it feels incredibly small when you are actually involved in it. It is very intimate, very small; it feels like a few people messing about with a camera.