Words matter. These are the best Stephen Colbert Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news ‘at’ you.
Thankfully, dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.
I’m a huge news junkie. I love what the news does.
I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing, to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you.
I don’t perceive my role as a newsman at all. I’m a comedian from stem to stern. You can cut me open and count the rings of jokes.
I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.
My mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.
I just think Rosa Parks was overrated. Last time I checked, she got famous for breaking the law.
If I had free time to go to Los Angeles to shoot a movie, I would rather spend it with my kids.
I started as a straight actor. I’d go onstage, and I’d think, ‘Wow, this is the only thing I want to work really hard at. I will rehearse fifty times on a single scene; I don’t care – I’ll do it again.’
Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.
I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I’d go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I’d listen to ‘Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow… Right!’ and ‘Wonderfulness,’ which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I’d flip them over, ’cause it was the old stackable turntable.
I don’t like books, they’re all fact, no heart.
I like being boring to a certain extent. I don’t have to be flashy. I get to put all of that into a show, and when it’s over, I don’t have to be that.
I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am?
Don’t be afraid to make things up. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They’re qualified to.
There’s a degree of narcissism involved in anything in show business. I mean, you can’t do it without a healthy ego. Why would you want anybody to listen to you?
My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.
I’m a simple man with a simple mind. I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states.
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.
When my car runs out of gas, I buy a new one. I don’t want to ride around in a quitter.
I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising.
Make no mistake: I love women. I’m married to one, I was birthed by one, and I played one in my high school production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ No one else could fit into the bodice.
Who really wants to be themselves when they’re teenagers?
In order to be a top-tier candidate, I need 7.5 million dollars, and I currently have 0.0 million dollars.
The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you.
I heard that after you throw away a ‘New York Times,’ it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.
I can’t prove it, but I can say it.
You shouldn’t listen to us at all if you’re looking for information. We don’t take ourselves seriously on any level; we’re just comedians.
Northwestern’s alumni list is truly impressive. This university has graduated best-selling authors, Olympians, presidential candidates, Grammy winners, Peabody winners, Emmy winners, and that’s just me!
I look, absolutely, like I’m going to sell you insurance.
In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.
I’m very comfortable with uncomfortable situations, and I think that can seem odd to people, that I like the thrill of discomfort.
I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.
We are thrilled that Jon Batiste is joining ‘The Late Show’ family of products. For my money, nobody plays like Jon Batiste. And you can trust me, because it is my money.
I’m not here to affect you politically or socially. I’m here to make you laugh. I use the news as the palette for my jokes.
I have a mug that actually verifies that I’m the world’s best dad. That’s a mug. That’s not me talking. You can’t just buy those.
I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.
I believe gender is a spectrum, and I fall somewhere between Channing Tatum and Winnie the Pooh.
All I can do is today and tomorrow and have some idea of what we’re doing next week. That’s all I can worry about.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn’t like the Watergate trials ’cause they interrupted ‘The Munsters.’
The first time I met Jon Stewart was at the press conference that Comedy Central held to announce Jon would be the new host of ‘The Daily Show,’ which back then was not called ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’
That’s my parenting style – ‘Go watch the TV.’ I’m one of 11 children, and my mother’s parenting style was, ‘There’s the TV. Go watch it. Mommy’s got 10 other people to take care of.’
When I got to ‘The Daily Show,’ they asked me to have a political opinion. It turned out that I had one, but I didn’t realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices.
There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.
The trouble with the jokes is that once they’re written, I know how they’re supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I’m more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.
I’m a satirist, so I’ve got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I’m not an assassin. If that ever happens, it’s only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.
My favorite off-camera memory of Jon Stewart is watching him jump from the second level of a tuna tower into the waters off Grand Cayman.
I do love my country. I don’t think I’m particularly a good American. I don’t know what makes a good American. Other than somebody who – I like people who let other people alone. I think that’s a pretty good American. And I keep my hands to myself. So I’m an OK American.