Quotes & Jokes by Bob Newhart
Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright. My own private theory is that stammerers have so many ideas swirling around their brains at once that they can't get them all out, though I haven't found any scientific evidence to back that up.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.
I worked in accounting for two and a half years, realized that wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and decided I was just going to give comedy a try.
It was a decision to work clean. I just prefer to work that way. I have no problem with comedians who don't work that way. There was a temptation in the early '70s to reconsider. I decided against it.
Television series are like the stock market. There's room for bears and bulls but no room for pigs. If we'd tried to milk another year out of the series, we'd have wound up with a pig.
I don't know how many sacred cows there are today. I think there's a little confusion between humor and gross passing for humor. That's kind of regrettable.
My friends were getting married, buying houses, buying cars, and I wasn't doing anything. There was the point was I talk to myself to you, every screw up nature, look at what you've done with your life. But there was always something on the horizon, that was holding, maybe, you know, this will make you different.
I think there's a part, just a part of comedians, that is still childlike.
The best advice I could give someone trying to get into the comedy field is to take advantage of every opportunity you have to work to hone your skills.
We presumed a certain intelligence on the audience, that they knew something about Sir Walter Raleigh, or about Abraham Lincoln, or the Wright Brothers.
The giant superstars are people whose talent is so enormous that their death wish can't destroy it.
In today's world, you would call my father mostly unaccessible. I'm not sure that isn't true of most fathers at that time. He went through the Depression. I don't know what that would have done to my psyche.
I'm one of those passengers who arrives at the airport five or six hours early so I can throw back a few drinks and muster up the courage to board the plane. Apparently I'm not alone because I've never been in an empty airport bar. I don't care what time you get there. Even at 8:00 a.m. you have to fight your way to the bar. At that hour, everyone drinks Bloody Marys so no one can tell it's booze- at least until they fall off their chair.
You should have a value system. You can win if you stick with your value system.