Johnny Carson Quotes

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.

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.

I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

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.

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

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?'

Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.

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

Some sad news from Australia... the inventor of the boomerang grenade died today.

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.

Despite the fact that computer speeds are measured in nanoseconds and picoseconds - one billionth and one trillionth of a second, respectively - the smallest interval of time known to man is that which occurs in Manhattan between the traffic signal turning green and the taxi driver behind you blowing his horn.

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

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

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.

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

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

Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.

For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.

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

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

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

Happiness is.....finding two olives in your martini when youre hungry.

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

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

Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.

When turkeys mate they think of swans.

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.

I loved the towns I grew up in as a boy, and after I became a celebrity, I went back several times. I would have had the time of my life seeing the old places and the old faces again, but the attitude of those same people was, "I guess you're so big we bore you now."

My success just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each day.

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness is being stuck in an elevator and discovering the ravishing blonde with you is a liquor salesman with a case of samples.

Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

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

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

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.

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.

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

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.

Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two ineffective political parties.