“If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.”

“A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.”

“Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.”

“If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.”

“Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.”

“A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.”

“Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.”

“Humor is just another defense against the universe.”

“I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.”

“Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names identities personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.”

“Humour is just another defence against the universe.”