A biography for Tom Lehrerhasn’t been written yet.
“I was immersed in popular songs of the time, of the '30s and '40s. I was writing songs, making fun of the attitudes of those songs, in the musical style of the songs themselves; love songs, folk songs, marches, football.”
“I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.”
“When you're in a public profession like I was, and you stop doing it like I did, people think you're either crazy or dead.”
“I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.”
“If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.”
“Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”
“One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money.”
“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
“Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff.”
“I loved high school, but I wouldn't want to do it again.”
“I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.”
“When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.”
“Bad weather always looks worse through a window.”
“It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.”
“If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.”
“There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.”
“I like Jon Stewart. He's not as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, whom I really can't stand.”
“I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math.”
“I wasn't really a performer by temperament.”
“My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.”