If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.
In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.
Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.
Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.
I've actually gotten so I don't associate television with entertainment very much.
Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!
Great humorists are great insulters.
I'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.
Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the people who handle it know what they are doing.
The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.
It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.
The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, 'You saved my dad's life.'
Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'
I know what it feels like to be a gun lover.
I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.
I always wanted to live in a haunted house.
It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you're stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, 'Hey, you're great! What's your name again?'
I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars - and, of course, the planets.
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.
The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.
Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.
I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.
I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.
Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.
When I'm doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: 'Tell about the guy who died on your show!'
Im perplexed when people adopt the modish abbreviation Ms. which doesnt abbreviate anything except common sense.
Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.
Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.
Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.
I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class.
A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.
I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they're qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.
The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.
All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'
The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.
It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
It's no fun being a specimen.
I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.
