A Quote by Johnny Carson

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 always loved clothes. I grew up in a blue-collar family, but I loved old movies and seeing all those dashing leading men.
How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.
As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.
I was attracted to black music for the same reason that I loved those old Irish ballads. Both were social statements of sorts, and both were indigenous to their respective cultures: Ireland, where my father had grown up, and towns like St. Louis along the Mississippi River, where I was growing up.
I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.
I was raised to believe that you had to do things better than white people in order to succeed. The old black shows were better than the white shows. "The Jeffersons" (1975) was a lot better. "Good Times" (1974) was way funnier. "Sanford and Son" (1972). Now, though, everyone thinks we're equal, so we submit the same shit that everyone else submits. And then we get mad when they won't air it. You got to go back to the old attitude of it has to be twice as good.
Growing up as a kid in Detroit, way back, there was a movie station that would show old kinescope reproductions of old movies, and I remember seeing Bela Lugosi for the first time and being duly frightened out of my wits.
Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, 'Boy, those were great old days.' Well, you know, we're living in the good old days.
Now they came back to him, on this night he was seventeen years old. All the years and places of his brief broken life came within mind's reach and made a whole again. He knew once more, at last, after this long, bitter, waisted time, who he was and where he was. But where he must go in the years to come, that he could not see; and he feared to see it.
If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?
My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.
I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, 'Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?', that fifteen year old boy would probably be like, 'what's plastic?'.
I grew up a big fan of the J. R. Ewing character of the 'Dallas' TV show, and I grew up around people who were very similar to J. R.: they had come into a ton of money. And they loved to flaunt it and loved to drive fancy cars and wear the big cowboy hats and nice suits.
The problem with the Jude Law "Hamlet" was simply that it wasn't unpredictable, that it was a very down-the-center modern production. You wouldn't go to the theater expecting to see an old-fashioned "Hamlet" where everybody wears an old fashioned costume. You don't get points for putting on a "Hamlet" where everybody dresses in black. I've seen that one several times. But again, it's not that it has to be new, it simply that it has to be different, fresh, that it doesn't bore, that it doesn't make me - I don't feel as I'm watching it that I know where it's going to go.
They had stopped now and he gave a glance up at the sky, through the trees, as though to see how much time was left. Amber, watching him, was suddenly struck with panic. Now he was going--out again into that great world with its bustle and noise and excitement--and she must stay here. She had a terrible new feeling of loneliness, as if she stood in some solitary corner at a party where she was the only stranger. Those places he had seen, she would never see; those fine things he had done, she would never do. But worst of all she would never see him again.
When Eric Clapton cut 'After Midnight,' he sold so many records and it was so big at the time, I decided that I would pursue the songwriting thing. I was 34 years old at that time. I'd been down the pike and back before I had any success at all.
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