Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by Jerry Lewis
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American comedian Jerry Lewis.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
You would not believe some of the scripts I have seen. I have read something like 160 that I've rejected, and I keep them all, for posterity.
I happen to believe in the human condition so strongly that I don't have to make up games to play with people. Here's what I think: If it's good, let's go for it. If it needs work to be better, let's work on it.
You can ask me anything you want. That doesn't mean I'm going to answer you.
Every day is another something that comes along.
Billy Crystal, Steve Martin do wonderful things.
Nothing can stop anyone who has a love and passion about their work.
I've never been more than 9 years old.
Love is what makes you dream, and love is what makes you want to get up in the morning. Love is something that you want to be a part of because it makes you better.
To ask a pratfall comedian, a dishes-in-the-face comic like me, to lay back and bring none of that stuff to the script because it doesn't call for it? That's tough.
When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff.
If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.
Gambling is part of the human condition. I love it. I have the best time gambling. I've been winning fortunes, and I've been losing them.
It'll keep you alive for another 10 years if you get yourself a laugh once a day: either provoke it, or look around in the wildest laboratory in the world, the public.
From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems.
I've had the greatest respect for my work in this country by Americans. Critics have no brains.
I get paid for what most kids get punished for.
You want to know why Barbra Streisand is so difficult? Because she's brilliant. She's a brilliant entertainer, she's a brilliant lady, and she's a wonderful human being, and the community doesn't like it.
When I'm working, I stay in ICU in any hospital that will get me a bed.
When I would be myself, I was being big-headed. I was being egotistical. I was a megalomaniac, when it really was just having not to be a monkey for a few hours a day. And fulfilling the need to be a man.
Adrenaline is so strong that none of us understand it.
God hadn't made me handsome, but he'd given me something, I always felt: funny bones.
When you get a question like, 'Did you like meeting Her Majesty?' 'No, I thought she was a slob.' I mean, what are you going to say... The mischief comes into me when I'm doing a Q&A, I'm 9 years old again. I don't get mad. I do get offended.
I say to everybody, love is what wakes you up in the morning, love is what makes you walk, and love is what makes you hope.
Going unnoticed has never been my strong suit.
People hate me because I am a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius.
I've had great success being a total idiot.
I never stop working.
Turning 90 is not for sissies.
Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.
People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.
Interviews are vital, but you cannot allow an interviewer to take your life and disturb it.
That never stops. That's what drives you: the joy and excitement of doing what you love.
I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have, and I never will.
If I was performing, I had no pain. But you can't stay on stage 24 hours a day.
The film I did with Bobby De Niro, 'The King of Comedy' - an awful lot came to me out of that movie because De Niro never allowed me any room to be crazy. If I had tried to play it the way I would normally play it and get hysterical, Bobby would punch me.
This is the pain pacemaker. I've got a battery under my skin. From that battery are two electrodes that go into the spine where they cut bone away to accommodate it. Now I put on the power here. If I have the pain, the stimulator starts. It's tingling, like when your foot falls asleep, you know?
I need the applause.
Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.
I think it has helped that I am so curious about what has been happening to me and that I have enjoyed watching the changes through my life, you know? I didn't know what was going to happen to me next.
There's nothing more dramatic than the comedy I've done. Because the comedy I've done is to get to the audience, get them to feel it, or they won't laugh.
I turned down 'Some Like It Hot.' See how smart I am? I felt I couldn't bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don't need to compete with the wardrobe.
When I was onstage doing the work, adrenaline killed the pain because I never hurt in front of an audience.
What's happened at 85 is I've lost my appetite. I used to be a little hog when I was young. But now I really don't seem to need it.
Every man's dream is to be able to sink into the arms of a woman without also falling into her hands.
I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don't get into it because I do comedy already.
Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!
I've raised my boys the old-fashioned way, with spankings, sending them upstairs if they misbehave at parties, the works. I believe discipline is the proof of love.
For a comic to put a public performance in jeopardy for a snickering little laugh - no, no, no, I don't believe in it.
The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.
Adrenaline is wonderful. It covers pain. It covers dementia. It covers everything.
I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'
A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.
I don't like any female comedians.
I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.
I think the cartoons that they're children are watching, particularly 'The Simpsons,' they're OK. I think that the adult audience is making much too much of the danger that they imply. That's not the case. The danger for children today, honey, is the news. Keep them away from news on television.
I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream, when I lock into someone or something, you can't get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That's in friendship, that's a deal, that's a commitment. Don't give me paper - I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand, that's for life.
I don't want to be remembered. I want the nice words when I can hear them.
I expect people that come to the studio to work to come with the same energy I come with. If I see less than that, I get very strong about, if you want to do this, come with a sense of pride, come with eagerness and anxiety.
Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.
When you're doing a different kind of film, you have to bring a different kind of attitude; you have to bring a different kind of concentration.
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