www.esquire.com Quotes

When you're eighty years old and looking back on your life, you want to have minimized the number of regrets you have. That's what should drive people. Not how much money they have.

You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.

The most effective way to leave a bar is to do so without comment, which is called the "Irish exit." To perform an Irish exit, you just leave. Maybe you hit the john. Maybe you go outside for a cigarette. But the point is, you don't come back.

You could leave. Leaving is underrated. Leaving a bar is an unconditional pardon that you grant to yourself. Nothing bad can happen after you leave. You won't be drinking. You won't be saying anything stupid. Because you've gone.

Don't be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable. For sketch writers, remember they're called sketches for a reason. They're not called oil paintings. Some of them are going to stink. You have to let them stink.

I really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it's a little unseemly for women of a certain age. But then once you pass sixty-five, you can hit it full tilt again and it's charming. Once you're Lauren Bacall's age, you can be like, "What the f*ck."

Twitter seems like a busman's holiday: just more writing. I have no plans to do it. I'll just stick with my 24/7 webcam. I'm old-fashioned that way.

The difference between male comedy writers and female comedy writers is that the male ones are taller and weigh more. They also fake-rape each other more. Female comedy writers pretty much never fake-rape each other. The women comedy writers do not urinate in cups around the office.

Date Night isn't just for married people. It's for all people, regardless of race or creed. If you liked Avatar? Imagine Avatar but everything is 2-D, and everybody's not blue.

I'm eighty years old. Eighty f*cking years old. I don't feel any different now than I did when I was thirty. Some areas, I'm not what I used to be. [...] But I'm lucky. I have no disease that's going to kill me, not yet. Dying, I just don't feel like it. I could be a handsome man at ninety.

Sex is something you can become good at, like fencing. You can learn how to fence. You can learn how to f*ck.

It's not hard to understand America's fascination with Marilyn Monroe. She was the first girl to wear see-through blouses.

It's been said that you can't understand anybody unless you understand their sexual life. A lot of people are frightened by that. Not me.

If you don't know your gift, you've got no lift.

As a kid, I never felt that I had anything or I was anybody. That was my ignorance. I never felt gifted. I paid no attention in high school. Once, I got every word wrong on a spelling test. The teacher gave me a minus zero because I even misspelled my name. I forgot to put the t in Schwartz.

How many people on this planet are van Goghs? Imagine an abstract painter who's f*cking nuts, who cuts off his ear, who lives with potato eaters when he could live better. Sells one painting his whole life. Imagine finding a nut like him in the Bronx. Wouldn't be hard.

There are a couple of things I want to impart to ladies who want to be in comedy: One, you don't have to be weird or be quirky to get your job done. And two, comedy skill is not sexually transmittable. You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you're doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.