A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me; it's a sign of security.

I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

If God wanted us to fly, He would have given us tickets.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.

These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.