Carl Reiner Quotations

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh.

It's like a bird. If he knew what he was doing, he would fall.

I'm a charming coward; I fight with words.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Everybody wants to laugh - you know that. They need to laugh... people need to laugh.

I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that - you don't even know if you're failing in drama, but you do know when you're failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don't hear anybody laughing, you know that you've failed.

A fellow who has a funny bone can learn to hone his skills, but I don't think you can develop a funny bone - you either have it or you don't. And by the way - when you get it, we don't know it.

If you can get a laugh out of a name, you're ahead of the game.

One of the things performers worry about is who you follow. But if I can't top what I heard in the last hour. ... There wasn't one iota of humor! You guys are so serious.

She was pretty and you never expected a pretty woman to be that funny. She didn't care that she was pretty.

He's doing nothing different except not going to work. His life is still the same.

I'm signing the letter that says, let's be quiet when he gets his award and just sit there. I think it's very sad that this man is being honored and the people he destroyed are never going to have a chance to be honored.

I am an atheist. I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.

Lust is easy. Love is hard. Life is most important.

Writing is the basis of all, because creating something that didn't even exist before is like taking an empty canvass. It is a wonderful thing to make something out of nothing. You've got an empty page, you've got an idea, and then you start typing and that is the most thrilling thing of all. And then if it becomes a movie or something else that's a plus, but the original writing of it is what's very exciting.

I'm not a believer, I call myself an atheist. It was man who invented God. I once wrote that there are 15 things I know about God, and one is that he is allergic to shellfish. There are far too many commandments and you really only need one: Do not hurt anybody.

Give yourself an impossible task and solve it - then you've got a really good story.

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow. ~Swedish Proverb Lust is easy. Love is hard. Like is most important.

I'm an entertainer and I entertain people and they entertain me back by asking questions. And some of them I answer.

An attitude will give you heft.

When I found out I could write I was shocked! I didn't know I could write.

I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.

Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.

Id like to acknowledge three people who early on knew Mel Brooks was one of the funniest people in the world: Sid Caesar, me, and Mel Brooks.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

When you denigrate people, they have two ways to fight back - with their fists and guns, or their mouths. And mouths are seemingly the easiest way to not get hit back. If people are laughing, they're not going to hit you.

I certainly have warm relationships with people, but you choose the people you have those relationships with. There are some people I don't bother with.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

I've done everything I've wanted to do. I have three children, I have grandchildren, I have books, I did movies, I've directed movies, I've done almost everything I've wanted to do.

I only please myself. I figure I'm just one of many people. I'm not that different from anybody else and I don't have great language - I'm very ordinary.

My father was a watchmaker and an inventor. I saw him working in the house every day. The work ethic, I got from him. He worked hard and he never complained about it.

Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be a fool but you're the fool in charge.

I love tweeting. I tweet every day. I stay in contact, I tell them what I'm doing. I've posted pictures of my books on there and they buy the books. It's a very good way to communicate with people, but I can't go to bed without tweeting something. I have to tweet something.

We were all up there, Dick and Mary and Rosie and Larry Mathews and I looked around and I said, inadvertently, 'Look at this, we could do a show,'

Bob Hope was not a television pioneer. He didn't learn his lines. If you don't learn your lines, I don't take you seriously. We never had a (cue) card.

There's some awfully good things done today and some awful terrible things done today,

I'm 83 years old. Rock music I understand. Rap music I'm just about to understand. But you guys I will never understand. What were you as kids?

In the funeral home, I never heard laughter like that in my life. The audience was laughing on the screen, and we were laughing in the home.

If you send out good people into the world, you know you've done something good.

Can someone please explain to me what that was all about?

Can someone please explain to me what that was all about? I was backstage and didn't hear one iota of humor during that entire presentation.