When you talk about yourself for 35 years, first of all, it gets repet — Lily Tomlin

"Your problem is your role models were models."

"Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably — or known to be — gay and ask "Why dont they come out?" But we dont know why they dont, and its none of our business, really. In 75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said "Time will give you the cover if youll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought wed make a deal. But that was 75 — it would have been a hard thing to do at that time."

"Its a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We cant decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. … I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy — from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated — but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it."

"If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?"

"I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe."

"What if its boring... or if its not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."