Robin Williams

[on Popeye] If you watch it backwards, it has a plot.

Canada is like a loft apartment over a really great party.

And now that you have a child you have to clean up your act, ’cause you can’t drink anymore. You can’t come home drunk and go, ‘Hey, here’s a little switch: Daddy’s gonna throw up on you!’

I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.

[to troops in Iraq] I’m looking at a group of heavily armed people here. I’m telling myself ‘if you’re not funny, it’s a problem’

See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.

You gotta wear the right trousers if you’re gonna be a rock star.

Mary Tyler Moore was a working woman whose story lines were not always about dating and men. They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about.

Optimism is nice if you can swing it. But you’ve got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump. And he is not normal. He’s abnormal. He’s a human What is wrong with this picture?

It may not be the best in someone else’s eyes, but it’s the best I can do.

A designer told me that my wife was a master of light and I was a master of time.

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

Working for me is like a gift!

It was reported that Guy Ritchie has cast his wife Madonna in a small walk-on role in his new movie, Revolver. Madonna will play the part of the woman who ruins the film.

If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?

I’m married, you know. I love my husband and I have a child.

I needed to explore my talent and versatility and see if I had another side to me, another sound.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

I don’t want to be a babe. I don’t want vanity to ever get in the way, because I think to maintain that, you have to be aware of yourself all the time, and that gets in the way of acting. My job’s not to be the beautiful person. My job is to be the best actor I can be.

Any time that people think enough of you to put up something that’s everlasting is only going to make you feel good.

We often read transcripts of Trump’s speeches, and it’s something that everyone should actually do once in a while. When you strip away his blindingly confident delivery and just read his words, it is staggering how incoherent he is.