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Interviews are vital, but you cannot allow an interviewer to take your life and disturb it.
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I dream in color.
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Turning 90 is not for sissies.
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The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.
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When I was young, I wasn't disciplined at all.
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I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'
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Adrenaline is so strong that none of us understand it.
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What's happened at 85 is I've lost my appetite. I used to be a little hog when I was young. But now I really don't seem to need it.
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People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.
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I think so much in time. I always have. Even at 20, I thought in terms of time, that I don't have a lot of time left. And I want to do so many things.
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A lot of people resent that I've been in someone's life for 50 years. Why shouldn't people have an affection for me and what I've done? Didn't I have to be genuine for them to buy into what I did? There are children who grow up today who will not have that when they're 55 years old. With whom will they have it? Name an example for me.
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This is the pain pacemaker. I've got a battery under my skin. From that battery are two electrodes that go into the spine where they cut bone away to accommodate it. Now I put on the power here. If I have the pain, the stimulator starts. It's tingling, like when your foot falls asleep, you know?
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I've never been more than 9 years old.
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It'll keep you alive for another 10 years if you get yourself a laugh once a day: either provoke it, or look around in the wildest laboratory in the world, the public.
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I expect people that come to the studio to work to come with the same energy I come with. If I see less than that, I get very strong about, if you want to do this, come with a sense of pride, come with eagerness and anxiety.
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What happens at 90 is that I don't walk so good, my eyes are going, I can't hear well, and I'm getting all of the 90s residuals.
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Seeing a woman project the kind of aggression that you have to project as a comic just rubs me wrong.
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I believe when you go out there, you have a responsibility to deliver. I have old-fashioned thinking when I'm out there.
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If you're an old pro, you know how well you're doing when you're doing it, and your inner government spanks you if you're not doing well.
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God hadn't made me handsome, but he'd given me something, I always felt: funny bones.
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When I arrived in Las Vegas, I felt I was embraced by it.
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I'm really, basically, nine, and I've always been that. I've never, ever allowed the child within me to die.
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I don't talk about anything negative.
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The greatest thing I can remember in my whole career was the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey clowns asking me to appear with them at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1965.