Alan King Quotes

As a parent, I’d – I’d be a better father.

Everything my mother made had to cook for 80 hours, and when she made matzoh balls she didn’t know fluffy. Everything sank.

My mother’s sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins.

My father was a dreamer – my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady‘s handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: ‘Don’t end up like me.’

You only live once, except for Shirley MacLaine.

Comedy is a reflection. We create nothing. We set no styles, no standards. We’re reflections. It’s a distorted mirror in the fun house. We watch society. As society behaves, then we have the ability to make fun of it.

When I was a kid, I used to send away for those ventriloquist kits on the back of comic books.

Did you hear the one about the elderly Jew on his deathbed who sent for a priest, after declaring to his astonished relatives that ‘I want to convert.’ Asked why he would become a Catholic, after living all his life as a Jew, he answered: ‘Better one of them should die than one of us.’

Marriage is nature‘s way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

I’m only… I’m only unhappy when the reviews are bad, but give me a good review and I’m a… I’m just screaming all over the place with joy.

I made it, Ma – Carnegie Hall. And I didn’t have to practice.

Comedy is an amazing calling. Once you get that first laugh, it’s hard to turn away. Then, of course, you’re hooked and you have to learn how to survive in the business.

Museums are good things, places to look and absorb and learn.

I just never saw my mother in any other room but the kitchen. There were always pots going.

Smoked salmon is for dinner. Belly lox is for breakfast. Don’t get that mixed up.

My father helped me leave. He said, ‘It’s all out there, it’s not here.’

There’s nobody to believe in anymore, nobody to trust.

My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn’t let him cut my nails.

When I get up in the morning, I have to decide what I’m going to have for dinner or I can’t get through the day.

Let’s face it: It’s difficult enough to be funny without worrying about what is going to offend whom.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

Banks have a new image. Now you have ‘a friend,’ your friendly banker. If the banks are so friendly, how come they chain down the pens?

Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up ‘vaudeville’ in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says ‘Milton Berle’ – and he made it just a tremendous party.

Modesty is not one of my virtues.

If you stop and think about it, nearly all great humor is at the expense of someone or something.

I can’t stay friends with anyone who doesn’t have a passion for something; and, generally speaking, artistic people, creative people carry it right into the kitchen, too. They have a zest for life; the excitement of living. All of the great eaters I’ve known are also men of great wit.

If you keep yourself alive and current, funny is funny.

Age, style, where you come from, where you were born, it’s different every time, which, to me, is refreshing because it says that there isn’t any one thing, one formula or kind of character that makes a great comedian. Everybody has had a different approach.

As you get older, as you become more sensitive, feel more, it becomes harder to make jokes. You censor yourself.

You do live longer with bran, but you spend the last fifteen years on the toilet.

I was a high school throw-out.

I don’t mind being 65, but nobody is gonna tell me to come in at 5:30 to have the early bird special.

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else‘s words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

I had a sympathetic role in ‘thirtysomething,’ and in two weeks I’m going to do the role again. But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It’s much more fun. Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.

We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator… Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or ‘stage’ Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.