Johnny Carson Quotes

The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in it's ear.

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.

Having money gives me the freedom to worry about the things that really matter.

I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.

In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.

How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

I'm often asked, 'What is your favorite moment during the 30 years you hosted The Tonight Show?' I really don't have just one. The times I enjoyed the most were the spontaneous, unplanned segments that just happened, like Ed Ames' infamous 'Tomahawk Toss' that produced one of the longest laughs in television history. When these lucky moments happen, you just go with them and enjoy the experience and high of the moment.

I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you. If you don't hurt anybody else, what you do is your own business.

If God didn't want man to hunt, He wouldn't have given us plaid shirts.

People are brought up to think, "It's nice to be modest. It's nice to hide your light under a bushel." Well, bullshit! I've never bought that. In my business, the only thing you've really got is your talent; it's the only thing you have to sell.

I know a guy who gave up smoking cigarettes, consuming, sex, and wealthy meals.

We have two kinds of air: regular and chunky style.

It's the lack of this kind of open and honest education about sex that causes so many kids to grow up with sexual hang-ups.

NBC's a little jealous of CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. They want to get a reporter with a macho-sounding name too, so they're changing Irving R. Levine's name to Scud Shrapnel.

There's a lot of hypocrisy in audiences. I'd never dream of telling even on a nightclub stage, let alone my show, some of the jokes that are told in a lot of the living rooms from which we get those letters!

Never ask your wife if she still hears from her old pimp.

It was so hot today that Burger King was singing, "if you want it your way, cook it yourself."

The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.

As for being sociable, I hate the phoniness in the showbiz world. I know this will be taken wrong, but I don't like clubs and organizations. I was never a joiner.

Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.

May you have the income of a Republican and the sex life of a Democrat!

The closest thing to Roseanne Barr's singing the national anthem was my cat being neutered.

Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.

When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.

Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.

Americans, too many of them, take themselves too seriously. You're going to get rapped - by the viewers, by the sponsors and by the network brass - if you joke about doctors, lawyers, dentists, scientists, bus drivers, I don't care who. You can't make a joke about Catholics, Negroes, Jews, Italians, politicians, dogs or cats. In fact, politicians, dogs and cats are the most sacred institutions in America.

Who cares what entertainers on the air think about international affairs? Who would want to hear me about Vietnam? They can hear all they want from people with reason to be respected as knowledgeable.

I am taking the applause sign home, putting it in the bedroom.

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money.

The only issue cash presents you is the independence of not stressing about funds.

Believe me, you don't walk away from the kind of money you make with a daily television show. You might get awful tired of it sometimes, but take a second look at the check and you get less tired right away.

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead.

I couldn't care less what anybody says about me. I live my life, especially my personal life, strictly for myself ... Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized. I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you.

Your chances of getting hit by lighting go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say Storms suck!!

I've worked ever since I was a kid with a two-bit kit of magic tricks trying to improve my skills at entertaining whatever public I had - and to make myself ready, whenever the breaks came, to entertain a wider and more demanding public.

Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whiskey, and a dog to eat the rare steak.

Talking about sexual morality, I wouldn't agree that it's declining, but it's certainly changing. Young and old, we are very much in the process of taking a fresh look at the whole issue of morality. The only decline that's taking place - and it's about time - is in the old puritanical concept that sex is equated with sin.

Asked how he became a star, Mr. Carson once replied, I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.

I don't run with anybody's herd. I don't like crowds. I don't like going to fancy places. I don't like the whole nightclub scene. Cocktail parties drive me mad. So I do my job and I stay away from the rest of it.

From the time I was a little kid, I was always shy. Performing was when I was outgoing. So I guess I am a loner. I get claustrophobia if a lot of people are around.

Talent alone won't make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: 'Are your ready?'

I heard from my cat's lawyer today; my cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.

Everybody I meet in public seems to want to audition for me. If I ask a guy what time it is, he'll sing it to me.

Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.

I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.

People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

They say atomic rad-i-ation can hurt your reproductive organs. My answer is, so can a hockey stick. But we don't stop building them.

If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.

I know you've been married to the same woman for 69 years. That is marvelous. It must be very inexpensive.

Democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head - this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle.

He's so fat, he can be his own running mate.

That would have been a great ticket, Reagan and Ford - an actor and a stuntman.

I owe one thing to my public - the best performance I can give.

Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.

I see a lot of new faces. Especially on the old faces.

If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace.

The Champagne they have stored is getting more valuable every year.

George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?

Maybe we should hold the next [Olympic] games in Afghanistan and hope the Soviets pull out of that one too.

I get sick of that old rationalization, "We're staying together because of the children." Kids couldn't be more miserable living with parents who can't stand each other. They're far better off if there's an honest, clean divorce.

Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often.

An oxymoron? What's that? A moron who studies at Oxford?

Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.

The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.

Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized.

In 1932, lame duck president Herbert Hoover was so desperate to remain in the White House that he dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt. When FDR discovered the hoax in 1936, the two men decided to stay together for the sake of the children.

I'm an entertainer; I try to give the public what it wants while I'm on the screen, and I'm completely sincere about it. If I don't happen to be a laughing boy off the screen, that doesn't make me a hypocrite or a phony.

I don't think it's you that changes with success - it's the people around you who change. Because of your new status, they change in relation to you.

I hear that whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.

Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.

Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies - outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn't do themselves.

Happiness is being served with a paternity suit on your 75th birthday.

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.

Desire! That's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being born with hidden talents. Desire.

We resort, frankly, to pies, which is a comedy staple that's gone back, I guess, to since the first pie was ever baked.

As long as I don't commit any crimes, you have no right to judge me except by my performance as a professional. On that level, you're welcome to think whatever you want about me.

I work because I enjoy what I'm doing, and the fact that I make money at it - big money - is a fine-and-dandy side fact.

Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.

Find me any performer anywhere who isn't egocentric. You'd better believe you're good, or you've got no business being out there.

Just be yourself -- it's the only way it can work.

According to statistics, it's a lot easier to get hit by lightning than to win a Lotto jackpot. The good side: you don't hear from your relatives.

The price of Christmas toys is outrageous - a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars for video games for the youngsters. I remember a Christmas years ago when my son was a kid. I bought him a tank. It was about a hundred dollars, a lot of money in those days. It was the kind of tank you could actually get inside and ride in. He played in the box it came in. It taught me a very valuable lesson. Next year he got a box. And I got a hundred dollars' worth of scotch.

I'm an entertainer, not a commentator. If you're a comedian your job is to make people laugh.

Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions.

There's only one critic whose opinion I really value, in the final analysis: Johnny Carson. I have never needed any entourage standing around bolstering my ego. I'm secure. I know exactly who and what I am. I don't need to be told. I make no apologies for being the way I am.

The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.

I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales.

If life were fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.

People are hypocrites. If you ask them what they want to see on TV, they'll tell you they want better quality programming. And then what do they watch? 'Gilligan's Island.'

When turkeys mate they think of swans.

I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits. I can't eat but one steak at a time. I don't want but one woman. It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth.

I have an ego like anybody else, but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.