"Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you.
There's no correlation between what the public likes and what I'm after. I'm in a different world.
I never think I feel cynical in general. Cynical is reality with an alternate spelling. I feel there's a gigantic amount of injustice and overt crime every day in the world, from emotional crimes to international crimes, and it often carries rewards.
I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon.
When I'm writing something, if there's a part that's good for me, then I'll play it. Otherwise, I don't. And I notice that there are less and less parts for me in my own writing.
Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.
Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.
I'm twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.
See, I will always have this penchant for what I call kamikaze women. I call them kamikazes because they, you know they crash their plane, they're self-destructive. But they crash into you, and you die along with them.
What is so fascinating about sitting around watching a bunch of pituitary cases stuff a ball through a hoop?
You make films whether they're dramas or comedies about neurotic people. Flawed people. Interesting personality traits. To make them about calm, stable untroubled people isn't interesting.
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
My gift was in comedy. I found out I could make jokes. I could tell jokes. I could write them. So over the years, that's what I've done.
I can't imagine any director directing a screenplay of mine, because the great directors all have very personal styles, and the ones that don't are not very interesting directors.
In 1940 I was just turning 5 years old and being taken to the movies. For those of us who were not old enough to understand the horror of war it was a very romantic era because these guys were kissing their wives and girlfriends goodbye and going off to fight and become heroes.
I am told the settlement of $5 million I am being paid is the largest amount ever paid under the New York right to privacy law
