Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Johnny Carson - Page 2

I am taking the applause sign home, putting it in the bedroom.

If God didn't want man to hunt, He wouldn't have given us plaid shirts.

I couldn't care less what anybody says about me. I live my life, especially my personal life, strictly for myself... Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized. I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you.

Money gives me just one big thing that's really important, and that's the freedom of not having to worry about money.

The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.

I loved the towns I grew up in as a boy, and after I became a celebrity, I went back several times. I would have had the time of my life seeing the old places and the old faces again, but the attitude of those same people was, "I guess you're so big we bore you now."

I work because I enjoy what I'm doing, and the fact that I make money at it - big money - is a fine-and-dandy side fact.

Happiness is being served with a paternity suit on your 75th birthday.

Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions.

I think it's almost immoral to keep on with a marriage that's really bad. It just gets more and more rotten and vindictive and everybody gets more and more hurt. There's not enough honesty about marriage, I think. I wish more people would face the truth about their marital situations.

I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.

George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?

We resort, frankly, to pies, which is a comedy staple that's gone back, I guess, to since the first pie was ever baked.

Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.

I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you. If you don't hurt anybody else, what you do is your own business.

I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits. I can't eat but one steak at a time. I don't want but one woman. It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth.

Americans, too many of them, take themselves too seriously. You're going to get rapped - by the viewers, by the sponsors and by the network brass - if you joke about doctors, lawyers, dentists, scientists, bus drivers, I don't care who. You can't make a joke about Catholics, Negroes, Jews, Italians, politicians, dogs or cats. In fact, politicians, dogs and cats are the most sacred institutions in America.

I've worked ever since I was a kid with a two-bit kit of magic tricks trying to improve my skills at entertaining whatever public I had - and to make myself ready, whenever the breaks came, to entertain a wider and more demanding public.

Ronald Reagan just signed the new tax law. But I think he was in Hollywood too long. He signed it, 'Best wishes, Ronald Reagan.'

How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?

Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.

I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.

Believe me, you don't walk away from the kind of money you make with a daily television show. You might get awful tired of it sometimes, but take a second look at the check and you get less tired right away.

As you all know by now, this is the 51st annual Academy Awards. Two hours of sparkling entertainment spread out over a four-hour show.

A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.

Only lie about the future.

I don't run with anybody's herd. I don't like crowds. I don't like going to fancy places. I don't like the whole nightclub scene. Cocktail parties drive me mad. So I do my job and I stay away from the rest of it.

When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.

It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth. I work because I enjoy what I'm doing, and the fact that I make money at it - big money - is a fine-and-dandy side fact. Money gives me just one big thing that's really important, and that's the freedom of not having to worry about money. I'm concerned about values - moral, ethical, human values - my own, other people's, the country's, the world's values. Having money now gives me the freedom to worry about the things that really matter.

Who cares what entertainers on the air think about international affairs? Who would want to hear me about Vietnam? They can hear all they want from people with reason to be respected as knowledgeable.

As for being sociable, I hate the phoniness in the showbiz world. I know this will be taken wrong, but I don't like clubs and organizations. I was never a joiner.

Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.

I get sick of that old rationalization, "We're staying together because of the children." Kids couldn't be more miserable living with parents who can't stand each other. They're far better off if there's an honest, clean divorce.

NBC's a little jealous of CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. They want to get a reporter with a macho-sounding name too, so they're changing Irving R. Levine's name to Scud Shrapnel.

In 1932, lame duck president Herbert Hoover was so desperate to remain in the White House that he dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt. When FDR discovered the hoax in 1936, the two men decided to stay together for the sake of the children.

I heard from my cat's lawyer today; my cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.

Talking about sexual morality, I wouldn't agree that it's declining, but it's certainly changing. Young and old, we are very much in the process of taking a fresh look at the whole issue of morality. The only decline that's taking place - and it's about time - is in the old puritanical concept that sex is equated with sin.

Having money gives me the freedom to worry about the things that really matter.

As long as I don't commit any crimes, you have no right to judge me except by my performance as a professional. On that level, you're welcome to think whatever you want about me.

If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace.

The good news is that the president gets another chance. The bad news is that he'll be two weeks older.

I see a lot of new faces. Especially on the old faces.

Audiences have proved time and again that they don't want a steady diet of any entertainer airing his social views - especially if he's a comedian.

People are hypocrites. If you ask them what they want to see on TV, they'll tell you they want better quality programming. And then what do they watch? 'Gilligan's Island.'

Do you know my dream? I really want to become an aluminum-siding salesman.

There's only one critic whose opinion I really value, in the final analysis: Johnny Carson. I have never needed any entourage standing around bolstering my ego. I'm secure. I know exactly who and what I am. I don't need to be told. I make no apologies for being the way I am.

I don't think it's you that changes with success - it's the people around you who change. Because of your new status, they change in relation to you.

The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in it's ear.

We have two kinds of air: regular and chunky style.

Air Canada. That's a good name for a Canadian airline.

They say atomic rad-i-ation can hurt your reproductive organs. My answer is, so can a hockey stick. But we don't stop building them.

I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales.

He's so fat, he can be his own running mate.

I'm not one of those who spring up yelling, "Yippee! Another day!" I'll grumble and sulk around a couple of hours, reading newspapers and trying to pick out an idea I might do something with on the show. But I don't really start functioning until noon or later; then about two I go to the studio and the pace begins to quicken.

Everybody I meet in public seems to want to audition for me. If I ask a guy what time it is, he'll sing it to me.

You become successful, the way I see it, only if you're good enough to deliver what the public enjoys. If you're not, you won't have any audience; so the performer really has more to do with his success than the public does.

People are brought up to think, "It's nice to be modest. It's nice to hide your light under a bushel." Well, bullshit! I've never bought that. In my business, the only thing you've really got is your talent; it's the only thing you have to sell.

I wouldn't have the slightest interest in running for public office. I'd rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.

I know a guy who gave up smoking cigarettes, consuming, sex, and wealthy meals.

Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.