If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.

I've got to keep breathing. It'll be my worst business mistake if I don't.

I never thought about success. I always thought about doing the job at hand. My goal was getting through the show that night.

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it.

I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it's easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin' man and the loner.

Everything is fraught with danger. I love technology and I love science. It's just always all in the way you use it. So there's no - you can't really blame anything on the technology. It's just the way people use it, and it always has been.

I love technology, and I love science. It's just always all in the way you use it. So there's no - you can't really blame anything on the technology. It's just the way people use it, and it always has been.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

Movies always are open to being remade because times change so much, and the tempo of movies changes. I think of it like a James Bond. They can have different actors play the same role... I've had people come up to me and say, 'We want to remake 'The Jerk' with so and so.' And I say, 'Fine.' It just doesn't bother me. It's an honor actually.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.

Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!

When I was in college, I was debating to try my hand at show business, or to become a professor. I just thought of the risk of not going into show business and always wondering if I would've had a chance. Because that's where my real heart was.

I've always believed that there are funny people everywhere, but they're just not comedians. In fact, some of my best comedic inspirations were not professional entertainers.

I thought 'Borat' was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn't some studio-produced script with 14 writers.

'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' is a good one because it not only turned out, I think, to be a really funny movie but it was also a delight to shoot. We were in the South of France, working with Glenne Headly and Michael Caine and Frank Oz the director - who were just fun.

I don't really remember, but I'm positive that whenever I cried, my mother gave me something to eat. I'm sure that whenever I had a fight with the little girl next door, or it was raining and I couldn't go out, or I wasn't invited to a birthday party, my mother gave me a piece of candy to make me feel better.

Food is not your remedy for problems. Food is not going to change your life. If you are lonely, food is not going to be your company. If you are sad, food is not going to give you solace.

It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.

Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.

Success in business today requires real-time, mobile access to business opportunities.

Informed consent is required for every invasive medical procedure, from getting your ears pierced to having an abortion.

I'm still waiting for someone to call me to cater their wedding. But that's gonna cost you. If you want my cousin Jerez to play the sax, that's going to cost you a little more. The sky's the limit after that.

Life is too short to not have fun; we are only here for a short time compared to the sun and the moon and all that.

As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

We emphasize negativity and violence in the media because that's what grabs everybody's attention, but in the real world, it's mostly people being very cooperative and caring and connected and kind. That's the norm of human experience. And yet, what gets our attention is the very opposite.

It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'

I was dating girls who were actresses, and that was fun, so I took a playwriting class. But that was short-lived. That was one year. Around that time, I was seeing movies that were making me think in terms of images.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I've always been interested in the industrialization of our food; it's been an issue for me from an environmental and animal rights and human health perspective.

The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.

No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.

Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.

A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations.

No man is a failure who is enjoying life.

A budget tells us what we can't afford, but it doesn't keep us from buying it.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

An invitation to a wedding invokes more trouble than a summons to a police court.

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.

Many of our prayers were not answered, and for this we are now grateful.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

Wealth flows from energy and ideas.

If you're naturally kind, you attract a lot of people you don't like.