Top 105 Steven Wright Quotes

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‘What the hell am I doing?’

I got a chain letter by fax. It’s very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

If it’s a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone, somewhere is making a penny.

My secret to staying young… Having no sense of time.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‘What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!’

My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It’s in the apartment somewhere.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because I’m in parentheses.

Don’t you hate when your hand falls asleep and you know it will be up all night.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‘Happy Birthday.’

I’m standing behind a wall of jokes. You don’t know about my personal life, my girlfriends, or what I do when I’m not on the road. There’s this guy, this comedian, and this is how he thinks, but people really don’t know anything about me.

What’s another word for Thesaurus?

I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter?

There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.

Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it’s dangerous.

I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out.

Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world… perhaps you’ve seen it.

I poured spot remover on my dog. Now he’s gone.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

I like to talk about lint and coasters, the expansion of the universe and maybe McDonald’s. I’m completely turned off by the idea of politics.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal… ‘Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?’

I wear a hat on stage so that people won’t be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don’t wear a hat, there’s no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

I met this wonderful girl at Macy’s. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

Only one in four jokes ever works, and I still can’t predict what people will laugh at.

I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep good?’ I said ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‘The Tonight Show.’ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won’t die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn’t have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.

What I like about the jokes, to me it’s a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won’t be funny.

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.

I had to stop driving my car for a while… the tires got dizzy.

If one synchronised swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included.

The other day I… uh, no, that wasn’t me.

I didn’t want to be selling insurance at 40, wondering what would it have been like to do stand-up.

I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‘How to Build a Boat.’

I like George Carlin’s jokes. I like his humor. He’s one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

When I was a kid, I went to the store and asked the guy, Do you have any toy train schedules?

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you’d get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it’s hard work, almost harder once you’re successful because you’ve got to maintain it.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

I don’t feel that I’m explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I’m not trying to be a mirror, showing them what’s really going on the world. All I’m trying to do is think of stuff that’s funny, just like when I’m kidding around with my friends.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

I was born. When I was 23 I started telling jokes. Then I started going on television and doing films. That’s still what I am doing. The end.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‘There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.’ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.

All those who believe in psychokinesis – raise my hand.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.