Artie Lange

“I wish I was this dark genius artist - like Richard Pryor or something.”

“People are so nice, you know. It's such a credit to Howard Stern - the audience base that he created is such a special thing. It took him a long time to create this family of fans, and I was lucky to be a part of that for a while.”

“I'm a comic, so I like to stay nocturnal. I work 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.”

“Only when you're in that ditch, lying there in the muddy runoff you've made of your life, gazing up at the peak you fell from, do you truly know how small you are and understand how tall you used to be.”

“I have been in a lot of movies, but none of them are critics' darlings, you might say.”

“I got into comedy so I could stay out all night.”

“I'm like the master of ceremonies being funny, and then sometimes people you're with, girlfriends and stuff, are like, 'God I wish I had the person on stage to be with all the time.'”

“Of course in show business there are two ways to play it and I am not politically correct so I am not going to get endorsements or anything like that.”

“When I became a standup comic, my hero, one of them, was Richard Pryor, and you know, I think that comedians, like, comedians talk about hacks, and what a hack is, is someone who does stuff that's not original.”

“I never went through a period were I wanted to be a doctor, a cop or even a rock star. All I wanted to do was play short stop for the Yankees from the time I was about 5. Then I turned 15 and realized how silly that was and just gave up on it.”

“The point of drinking in moderation is that sometimes you don't drink in moderation.”

“When you're on the road a lot, you're in perpetual search of a good night's sleep.”

“When I encountered rich people for the first time, I discovered that not only do they holiday in places that are hard to find on a map, but that they also use the names of seasons as verbs. When they asked me, 'Where did you summer and winter growing up?' I would usually say, 'As a child? The same place I springed and autumned.'”

“You know you have a gambling problem when it's 4 A.M. at the Mirage Sports Book and you're walking around going, 'Hey you get the lacrosse scores?'”

“When you're an adult, when times are good, entire years go by in what feels like the space of one season. But the worst trick time plays on you is just how slowly the worst times in your life take you to live through.”

“It's weird because standup can be like therapy. Comedians can't be satisfied with just having fun with our friends. We've got to figure out a way to do it on stage.”

“'Course the world of sports takes itself way too serious. Sports writers are all high and mighty.”

“You haven’t lived till you’ve played Scrabble in a psych ward.”

“Richard Lewis is the master at taking a joke that he's told a million times in a row in the past year, on the road, and making it look like he's pulling it out of thin air.”

“When you did impressions on 'MADtv,' the producers gave you a Walkman that played huge sections of whatever movie was being parodied, with your character's catchphrases recorded on a loop. You'd wear this thing around during rehearsals and for a week listen to the voice you had to impersonate over and over again. It drove all of us crazy.”