Top 33 Dana Carvey Quotes

The two things that can hurt you are if you need money or if you need fame. Those are the things that can be your Achilles heel. But if you don’t need money and you don’t need fame, then you’re free.

I never read the tabloids.

There’s always been a confusion about my sensibility. ‘Is he kind of edgy, or is he Carol Burnett?’ I’m a little bit of a hybrid. I like to please, but I like dark stuff, too.

Every celebrity in the world, if their movie bombs or whatever, they hold their kid up on a magazine and say, ‘I’m really a dad.’

This movie will actually increase the sex life of parents everywhere because they can put this on, with the 45 minutes of extras and they’ve got almost two hours to do whatever they’ve got to do while the kids watch the movie.

I always grew up with, ‘Question authority.’

After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that.

Monty Python never directly said, ‘We’re liberals’ – they just did their sketches, and you had to figure it out. Generally, they were anti-establishment, of course, making fun of the people in power. I think, comedians, that’s their job – pointing out what other people might not notice and going, ‘Yoo-hoo, over here.’

If you just kind of live a regular life and make good ‘Hollywood’ money, you have a certain freedom.

I always tend to think of all of my shows as possibly my last show. I’m like a junior Springsteen, without the underbite.

I think there’s a big price to pay for consciousness, knowing that it’s all going to end and we’re mortal. I envy dogs. They don’t know they’re getting old! And they don’t know it’s towards the end. I mean, they never think, ‘I used to get by on 16 hours of sleep a day. Now, if I don’t get 19, I’m a wreck.’

The kind of money that show business will pay you, unless you need to have shoes made of diamonds, you can actually put it in the bank and sort of be okay.

I grew up middle class – my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

I did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and ’85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.

I recently found out about this other super movie star. He only works from about 11:00 to 4:00, so all his movies take like 120 days. But this was a lot of stuff to do in 35 days.

I know it’s a cliche, but the whole family is just whacked. I mean, we’re all out of our minds. They’re the funniest, most eccentric bizarre people I’ve ever met, my siblings.

I’m a real people-pleaser.

I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

I’m thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.

In maybe 1963, we had ‘Collier’s Encyclopedia,’ and they sent us their yearly LP. I heard the Beatles talking on there. That was the first time I tried altering my voice, doing a Liverpudlian accent.

I have a theory that if you’re famous more years than you’re not famous, then you get a little nutty.

I remember doing a comedy show with Jim Carrey once, and he was out there with his foot behind his neck and rubbing his face with it.

When people come to see my stand-up, they get a chance to see my characters interact with each other. I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you’re allowed to censor it.

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it’s kind of like one-man sketch.

That’s why modern corporate movie making has become so laborious that comedians are kind of kicked out by 50.

I used to sneak up to the 8th floor and watch Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo rehearsing ‘Saturday Night Live’ and could only wonder if I would ever have the chance to be funny. It took me five years to go up the two stories, but it is such a sense of fulfillment to be able to show what I can do on national television.

When people come to see my stand-up, they get a chance to see my characters interact with each other.

You just have to be very humble if America has really worked for you like it has for me. Most of my friends are poor. Most of my siblings are poor. I see how hard it is just to get money unless you’ve got some incredible luck or work incredibly hard. I want everyone to do well. I wish ‘Wayne’s World’ money on you!

I did a sitcom with Desi Arnaz Jr. in a pilot called ‘Whacked Out.’ We were bombing, and Lucille Ball grabbed the mic and started berating the audience.

I was not in ‘Iron Man 2,’ but I take a daily iron supplement.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.