A biography for David Steinberghasn’t been written yet.
“On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' it takes almost a year to get 10 shows written. It always reminds me of my old yeshiva days, where you used to sit over a piece of Talmud and analyze everything that was going on.”
“We were the guys on the other side. It was hilarious.”
“And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.”
“The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.”
“I don't believe any particular ethnic group is smarter than any other group.”
“My influences were Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.”
“The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.”
“You don't need to be stable to be a stand-up comedian.”
“In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.”
“The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.”
“Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.”
“Being a lawyer in New York sucks because you're working eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week.”
“A spontaneous interview feels differently than anything else you see on television.”
“The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.”
“My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.”
“I rewrote it and I took all your notes. Read it again, that kind of persistence paid off.”
“Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That's a great perspective for a comedian.”
“When I started, you didn't make a lot of money by being a comedian. You didn't get a lot of respect.”
“I used to have a theory actually that, if you've had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you're going to make a lousy comedian.”
“The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.”