My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

All these things that enter your head are assignments. You write them up and then throw them out there and if someone wants to do it, your assignment is done.

I have a kind of objective luxury about my career.

What I learned, a little too late, was that the 'traditional' Martin Short target viewer weighs under 300 pounds. Unfortunately, I was on during daytime.

Sometimes people get passionate about the obscure jokes.

People do think I'm Jewish. But we're Irish Catholic. My father had a brogue.

I've chosen to treat my life more like a party than something to stress about.

What's great about being a character actor is you know that you can survive forever. It's not about the gloss of your eyebrows.

I've never done an improvised movie as a fictitious character. I think that's the challenge.

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

Being the youngest of five, you're adored, you're fueled with confidence.

No one is any one thing.

One of my great influences was Don Knotts as Barney Fife.

You go through publicists because it's easy for a publicist to say to another publicist, "No".

I have sometimes imagined my own death and brought myself to tears.

I've done lots of improv things but not a whole movie.

I think I'm funny because my family, my siblings were funny.

I hate to lull the audience into letting them think that something is something. It's always fun to defy expectations.

David Lynch and I almost made a movie together in the late '80s. We had lots of dinners and lunches. He's a very cool, hip guy. This film, let's face it, is like an homage to him, I would imagine he'd find it funny.

Someone once asked me what was the weirdest question I was ever asked. And I was stymied.

I think loss can fuel how you lead your whole life.

I pretend I'm one of the royal family when I'm in a hotel and that the hotel belongs to me - it is a palace.

All you're trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room.

I know if I were to drop dead now, people would probably write nice things in the obit.

You try to figure out things to keep yourself interested. It's very easy to get lulled.

You go through publicists because it's easy for a publicist to say to another publicist, 'No'.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

There is a lot of absurdity sometimes, not just in Mormonism but often in other religions that want to pretend that no bad happens in their church, rather than taking care of what bad does happen.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

There's so much absurdity. Poverty is so absurd.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk.

Annihilation is an absurdity in terms.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.