Jerry Seinfeld Quotes
Actor & Stand-up comedian
The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun.
It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
You know you're getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It's like, 'See if you can blow this out.'
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.
I am so busy doing nothing... that the idea of doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.
Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.
To me, if life boils down to one thing, it's movement. To live is to keep moving.
Make no mistake about why these babies are here - they are here to replace us.
We want to do a lot of stuff; we're not in great shape. We didn't get a good night's sleep. We're a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.
My parents didn't want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that's the law.
There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men don't think there's a lot they don't know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, 'I know what I'm doing, just show me somebody naked.'
Pay attention, don't let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.
You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive.
My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.
Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV.
Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.
A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.
I don't want to hear the specials. If they're so special, put 'em on the menu.
That's the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.
Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end.
People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.
I prefer the old theaters because the audience is... trapped.
Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.
You don't even really need a place. But you feel like you're doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.
If you're a surfer, you just want to surf. You don't know if anyone's going to see you, and you don't really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.
The IRS! They're like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!
The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you're into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.
Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic - you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.
If you go to a bad movie, it's two hours. If you're in a bad movie, it's two years.
When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.
Men want to make women happy.
You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.
Nobody enjoys the 'little show about nothing' humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.
I think it's funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.
I won't do something unless I can get at least two or three good laughs out of it. If I can't, it's not gonna make the team.
Funny is the world I live in. You're funny, I'm interested. You're not funny, I'm not interested.
I like definitive things.
When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.
The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.
You can be passionate about anything.
I have this old '57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I'll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, 'cluh-CLICK-click.' That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that's what I'm into.
If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it's an incomparable experience.
Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.
I like money, but it's never been about the money.
I wrote an article on a new Porsche for 'Automobile Magazine.' I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I'm more proud of that than anything.
Stand-up is hard.
We sold 'Seinfeld' all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.
I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they're doing. People don't look at me. They don't even know I'm there.
I'm a big believer than a great bit is a great bit - if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they're beautiful things when they're done.
Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.
Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.
When you're in comedy, people always come up and say, 'Oh, it must be so hard.' It really isn't hard unless you're not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.
The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn't have that kind of personality, and it's a terrifying thing to say.
The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That's why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, 'Bye!'
Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That's when you know the most, you've seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.
When you make a TV show, they always say you're a guest in someone's home. Online, you're a guest in someone's face. So that's why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I'm in your face.
I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating - is this the exact right mix? I think that's - to me it's anti-comedy. It's more about PC-nonsense.
Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn't really bother me.
I love being a dad. I just love it.
I've done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they're going to be compared directly against other ads.
I don't need you to be funny. I don't want to be entertained.
As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don't get that.
Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There's entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.
I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.
I'll tell you one thing, since I'm married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.
I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they're all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.
To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.
I don't want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I'm completely confused. I'm like, 'Didn't you make that movie already?' I've been very fortunate, and I'm well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.
A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.
There's different kinds of laughs. It's like a baseball lineup: this guy's your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we're gonna win.
I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.
You want to do good things, and once you've done a couple of good things in a row, you think 'Well gee, let's not mess this up.' But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.
You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual - which nothing is more actual than stand-up - it's a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time - we miss that.
A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.
A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it's kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the '60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake.
We've fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.
For me, it's a purity thing about the joke itself. It's a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that's a legitimate item you have there. For me, it's nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It's just not what I'm in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.
There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don't really think most people really understand what they've seen.
Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it's my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.
Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.
It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.
The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I'm making 22 minutes; I know there's a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.
I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I'm doing new stuff all the time.