Garry Shandling

“Nobody can write better jokes putting me down than me.”

“I practice safe sex - I use an airbag.”

“I actually think I'm more of a turtle than Verne is. Where Verne is up on two legs and moving at full speed and doesn't pull his head into the shell very often, I in reality was five or ten minutes later to every recording session.”

“Dogs are not people. Be leery of any woman who refers to her dogs as her 'kids,' because you'll only end up paying for their schooling.”

“'The Larry Sanders Show,' it's actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn't exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don't think the show was.”

“My first appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show was in '81.”

“I think sometimes I should do more carousing, because I don't do much and maybe it would be fun occasionally. It's hard for me to have fun and I'm a serious thinker and a searcher and funny from the front.”

“I think I look great in green, and I'm going to start wearing more green.”

“Here's the thing - I'm single, I haven't been married, I don't have kids yet. If I do have kids I would be interested to see them in my life, so here's a movie for kids and I'm in there and I'm supposed to be kind of funny for kids.”

“My second or third year in the engineering department, I got very frustrated, and I sat down with myself and had a soul-searching conversation with myself and said, 'What I'd really like to do is see if I can write comedy.' ... I moved to L.A. stone cold. Didn't know anybody; didn't know how to go about it. Really started from scratch.”

“First of all, I'm not the kind of guy that likes to rehash the show and so forth and so on.”

“My first 'Tonight Show' was just one of those things - I mean this seriously - a cosmic, meant-to-be coming together of circumstance. You walk out there to do your first 'Tonight Show': Is the audience going to be hot? Are you going to be on fire? It's like an athlete: Are you going to have your moves at a peak?”

“When I give notes on a script, I say, 'Guys, I may drift, but it's part of the process.' So I'm aware that I'm drifting, but I'm grabbing a lot of stuff.”

“I like to talk on the cell when I do interviews. That way, I double my chances of getting brain cancer: from the cell phone, and from the questions.”

“I once made love for an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was the night the clocks are set ahead.”

“I had no idea who I was when I started. I was frightened to death and had no natural performing skills.”

“I've never had anyone put on a puppet show to convince me of anything. And I've done a lot of stuff. I don't know that I would put the puppets on when I was pitching a show. This was the head of the studio putting a puppet show on. And I'll tell you, he wasn't bad.”

“When I don't have a good time, it's usually because there's a stiffness that stifles creativity.”

“But I really like hosting, I think it's a strength of mine. It allows me to improvise, and I love the spontaneity of that, and I think I'm funny behind the desk when interviewing someone.”

“My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don't really know me.”