If you want to read about love and marriage you've got to buy two separate books.
I won't eat in a place that has suits of armor.
Did you hear the one about the elderly Jew on his deathbed who sent for a priest, after declaring to his astonished relatives that 'I want to convert.' Asked why he would become a Catholic, after living all his life as a Jew, he answered: 'Better one of them should die than one of us.'
Banks have a new image. Now you have 'a friend,' your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens?
Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We're reflections. It's a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.
My mother's sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins.
I made it, Ma - Carnegie Hall. And I didn't have to practice.
As you get older, as you become more sensitive, feel more, it becomes harder to make jokes. You censor yourself.
I learned to cook in self-defense. My wife doesn't know what a kitchen is. In the first month of our marriage, she broiled lamb chops 26 nights in a row. Then I took over. I used to mind her not caring about food, but no more - as long as I can eat what I want.
When I was in the hospital they gave me apple juice every morning, even after I told them I didn't like it. I had to get even. One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, 'It's a little cloudy.' I took the tube from her and said, 'Let me run it through again,' and drank it. The nurse fainted.
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.
Age, style, where you come from, where you were born, it's different every time, which, to me, is refreshing because it says that there isn't any one thing, one formula or kind of character that makes a great comedian. Everybody has had a different approach.
I don't mind being 65, but nobody is gonna tell me to come in at 5:30 to have the early bird special.
Ed Sullivan brought me to TV first in 1952, then Garry Moore's program gave me a lot of confidence and freedom.
Everything my mother made had to cook for 80 hours, and when she made matzoh balls she didn't know fluffy. Everything sank.
My father was a dreamer - my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady's handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: 'Don't end up like me.'
We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator... Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or 'stage' Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.
Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party.
Right when I started in show... Milton Berle was my first idol. When I was a kid, I went to see Milton at Lowe's State, and I never laughed so much, and I said, 'That's who I want to be; that's what I want to be.'
