Don rickles quotes

Who am I to judge is what I say. I'm 90 years old, for crying out loud, and I don't sit in any chariot.

The old days were the old days. And they were great days. But now is now.

You lose your energy, you lose that excitement and it gets the audience up.

They always use the word 'insult' with me, but I don't hurt anybody. I wouldn't be sitting here if I did. I make fun of everybody and exaggerate all our insecurities.

You got to have a lot of courage. Secondly, whatever it is you're doing you have to believe in it wholeheartedly. Thirdly, you have to be able to stand up in front of people and know that they'll laugh.

I have a problem, if the light goes on on TV and it blinks midnight, I don't know how to fix it.

I was always the guy - out of insecurities, I was always making fun, even as a kid.

I still have drive, but everything is relative.

An insult comic is the title I was given. What I do is exaggeration. I make fun of people, at life, of myself and my surroundings.

Room service is great if you want to pay $500 for a club sandwich.

When I first went to Vegas, there were just high-rollers and gamblers and the wise guys treated you great.

Alan King, a comedian I adored, was considered society, and I was considered the Jewish kid from the neighborhood.

I always enjoy being full of fun, but I have my serious moments. Some women go for the studious kind of guy, I certainly was not that. If a girl is looking for somebody different and maybe a little more exciting for themselves - someone more on the fun side, I would suggest that they look for a type like Don Rickles.

Smartphones. Who cares? Smartphones. I only have dummy phones.

You throw your best punch, otherwise don't do it.

I don't feel an obligation to give everyone a hard time, but when they're important people, it's fun.

When you stand alone and sell yourself, you can't please everyone. But when you're different, you can last.

So many young people think the big sex act is the whole movie, but that's not the case. You need to be able to talk and laugh and cry together.

I don't really tell a joke per se, I build up an attitude and it becomes a joke.

You can't study comedy; it's within you. It's a personality. My humor is an attitude.

I don't really tell a joke, I react to situations. The whole thing is just looking at somebody and showing all our weaknesses and exaggerating them, and that's how it becomes funny.

I think if I took therapy, the doctor would quit. He'd just pick up the couch and walk out of the room.

I've never had guys sit me down and say this is what you've got to do. It's my personality that makes me one of a kind, and I believe that.

I take pride in being very unique in what I do. Nobody else can do what I do and I don't mean to say that egotistically, it's just something in my personality.

I was a mother's boy.

Showbiz is great if you're successful.

My health, thank God, has kept my brain alive.

Everything I do on stage, I made up in saloons. I started doing it in front of people, and that became my performance. I never had writers.

I've never walked off stage and said, I shouldn't have done that. Because when you do what I do, you're like a fighter. You throw the right hand and say, That's what got me to this dance. You can't have doubt. If you have doubt, there's no show.

I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.

That I walk around calling people 'dummy' and 'hockey puck'. I do have a different life apart from being sarcastic on stage. I might kibitz around with my friends, but I'm nothing like the person who does stand up. Nothing like that.

It takes many years to be a great comedian.

Struggling is hard because you never know what's at the end of the tunnel.

I don't care if the average guy on the street really knows what I'm like, as long as he knows I'm not really a mean, vicious guy. My friends and family know what I'm really like. That's what's important.

I have my own gym. When you do jokes and they sell, you get a gym.

I've never been mean-spirited, in my opinion. I never did anything below the belt.

My main success was an attitude. Always an attitude.

Italians are fantastic people, really. They can work you over in an alley while singing an opera.

Hell, do I remember the first joke? I was never a jokester.

I've got an accountant who's been with me forty years. If he makes a mistake, he dies.

I don't do impressions.

I never could tell a joke. I just started talking to the audience, and when the drunks would yell, "Hey, when do the broads come on?" I got good at saying, "Relax. Clear your skin up first." They called me "the insult guy," but it's never mean-spirited. I'm just exaggerating everything about us and about life.

The man I adored, and miss him terribly, was Johnny Carson.

You know what's funny to me? Attitude.

When I got out of high school, I wanted to be an actor but was getting a lot of rejections. I was getting rejected by life. My mother, God rest her soul, told me not to quit.

I would describe myself as a guy that's very normal but has the tendency to rib people, but never in a mean-spirited way.

Women were afraid of me, they were scared to death. But I always say be yourself, if you're funny then let your sense of humor go there. I mean there's no sense hiding what you feel.

I always rib people, but nobody ever gives me a hard time. I don't know why. Maybe they're afraid of what I might say. There's probably a lesson in that somewhere, but I don't know what it is.

I have to have energy because I have a lot of expenses. A couple of cars, couple of dogs and a big estate.

In the 45 years I've worked in casinos, I dreamed of being honored by an organization like the American Gaming Association, especially since I don't even have a hunting license.

It's tough having the last name Rickles. Luckily, my kids handled it great.

I think they [Martin Scorsese, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra] liked my honesty. My personality. For that, they always treated me great. I, in turn, treated them great. No secret about it. My being who I am - that is that.

When I'm onstage, I'm acting.

Once in a while, when I'm alone, I think about my age. I think, How many more years do I have on this earth? But I can't really conceive of dying. Somehow, in my head, I don't think I'll die. I know that everybody dies, of course. I just think that it'll never come to me. It's crazy, but there it is.

When you're 18, you're just so busy being scared and having fun - a crazy mixture - that you never thought of dying.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

Show business is my life. When I was a kid I sold insurance, but nobody laughed.

I do situations and make fun of authority and life.

When you enter a room, you have to kiss his ring. I don't mind, but he has it in his back pocket.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

My father when walked into a room, you could tell that everybody loved him. They really did. He was quite a man. My mother was more into the show biz atmosphere than he was.

Al Capone's my uncle. The old days were a lot different. The Latin Casino was the big time. When I got there I figured that I was doing pretty good, because remember, I started in nothing but after hours joints. I can't even name them now, but that's how I got noticed.

Well, I call myself an actor. I always wanted to be one.

I was with George Washington at Valley Forge, sitting around before an attack... gimme a break. That's over 70 years ago already.

My style is my personality. It's always been that way. Being a wiseguy and having fun. It's always been that way for me, when I was in high school, and in the Navy. It's not something I rehearse.

I've never had a writer, and I'm proud of that. Everything I've per­formed has been from my own head.

I've never gambled a dime. Never, in all my years in Vegas.

What I do is, I make fun of people and I make fun of myself and things around us and exaggerate things. And I'm never mean-spirited. See, the word insult means some guy who's a real unkind human being. But I don't do that, because otherwise I wouldn't be headlining all these years, thank god, and all these people showing up to see me.

It's very sweet to have people say nice things about you, and I always accept that.

I knew most of the people there who ran the places, a lot of wiseguys. They're all gone now. All good people.

Some people say funny things - but I say things funny.

I used to play golf. I wanted to be a better player, but after a while I realized I'd always stink. And that's when I really started to enjoy the game.

To me, the stand up part in my life is great. I know I can do that. When I get an acting chance, I'm really thrilled.

We show a lot of film [with Regis Philbin] from my career which is most enjoyable. I enjoy watching it.

I can sit all day in a comfortable chair and watch ball games, but I don't need a blanket.

I'm very shy so I became very outgoing to protect my shyness.

Political correctness? In my humor, I never talk about politics. I was never much into all that.

Frank Sinatra enjoyed my humor, so I could say almost anything to him. I mean, within reason.

I don't get into politics. I know [Donald] Trump, but I don't follow that. That's just an aside for him when he has nothing else to say. He never involved me in any of that stuff.

When you talk about George Burns you're talking about a living legend . . . well, a legend, anyhow.

I'm always watching films. The Academy pretty much sends me every film that's ever been done. I enjoy watching them, especially with the people I know.

I grew up in an Orthodox family, as I grew older, I became Conservative and that's how it ended up. But I've developed that Jewish feel to my act from my surroundings and my family.

Regis Philbin is very successful in his own right. We have a new thing where he have chairs and we sit and talk to each other about my career and his career. It works pretty well if I do say so.

Yeah, I make fun of blacks, and why not? I'm not a black.

Everything I've ever done in my whole career, people might not know, I've never written anything down on paper.

I have no idea what I'm going to say when I stand up to give a toast. But I do know that anything I say I find funny.

It's just to break things up between stand-up gigs. I would only do it periodically. Maybe just an East Coast thing.

When you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

I still think funny, and people young and old still come and see me. That's flattering. The day comes that they stop coming, then I'll know that it's time to retire to the Jewish ranch.

The thing I love about Vegas is that it's a melting pot. It's like working Ellis Island.

I was nice to the people in the Philippines for the two and a half years I was there, because I knew even­tually I'd have to kiss up to them so my grandchildren could have toys.

Who picks your clothes - Stevie Wonder?

Half the battle is that people have to like you before you say one joke, one bit of humor.

I'm not a big one for jokes. I can't tell a joke, believe it or not. If you gave me a thousand bucks and said, "Don, get up at a party and tell a joke," I'm the worst.

The transformation has been unbelievable. When I started here, I worked in a place where the Sky Room was on the second floor.

Some people call me a legend and the last of the greats, and I appreciate it.

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.

I never went out looking for glory.

Every night when I go out on stage, there's always one nagging fear in the back of my mind. I'm always afraid that somewhere out there, there is one person in the audience that I'm not going to offend!

Famous people are deceptive. Deep down, they're just regular people. Like Larry King. We've been friends for forty years. He's one of the few guys I know who's really famous. One minute he's talking to the president on his cell phone, and then the next minute he's saying to me, Do you think we ought to give the waiter another dollar?

No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a Jew sitting in the beach chair next to you.

In the old days, that was my ad-lib for hecklers in the joints I worked. It stuck with me. I hardly say it now, say, to fans, even though people do send me hockey pucks.

If I were to insult people and mean it, that wouldn't be funny.

To my knowledge, I was the first guy really to do what I do. And then later on different comedians started trying doing it.

Sex is great, but when you get to be my age, you've got to pace it a little bit. Otherwise you get tired.

People think being in your seventies means sitting around in a chair with a blanket over your legs, drooling.

My whole act is off the top of my head.

I always say that comedians and actors were all kind of shy when they were young. I was very, believe it or not, kind of embarrassed as a child. But my mother was a very strong lady and she was the one that kept it going when I thought it would be over for me as a performer. She was always my inspiration and she was a big influence on me.

I'd like to think my performance is today. I never try to - it's so, as you know, watching me, I have a beginning, middle and ending. But every night the show changes and I relate to an audience and I relate to the young people.

My father wasn't much for show business. He was an insurance man - very well-liked, very warm. He had a lot of friends.

Asians are nice people, but they burn a lot of shirts.

You've got to be able to sell yourself.

I cannot tell a joke. But I can do a situation, that it becomes a joke.

Whatever you do to gain success, you have to hang in there and hope good things happen. Always think positive.

Eddie Fisher married to Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.