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"I didn't have meanness in the comedy. The times that I tried to be darker or meaner or hipper didn't work. It just wasn't where I came from, and sometimes the writers would say 'boss, nobody says I love you. You can't say that anymore.' I go, 'well, we're going to say it.'" 

"I never plotted anything. I never wrote anything down. It was always in my head. It's the only way to do it. Otherwise, you get nailed to a formula that you think may work. What happens if the actor doesn't like it? I used to let the actors run the first reading on its feet.  I'd say, 'you guys do it. Let me see it.' And they would do some things that would be good; but, they'd fall apart and say 'help'. I would step in and say, 'save this, save that. The impulse to go there is correct, but don't do this....'"

"I think it requires being conscious of timing and conscious of your straight man. Andy and I, in essence, I was really being a second banana. Not that Andy played it that funny, but he had jokes. Not jokes, but he had some humor to his character. It's just all part of comedy."

"At the end of the day it doesn't matter how much money people are being paid or how many trucks you have on the sidelines. What'd you get inside the frame? That's all I care about."

"Everything doesn't have to read funny to be played as a first-rate comedy -- it's in the interpretation... Gleason used to say, 'if it's funny, it's never going to go out of style because it makes you laugh'."

"I like a lot of preparation because when you get to the moment, you can just forget your lines, you're not thinking, 'what's my line?' you're feeling what the character is, and only that line can come out."

"One of the things I was trying to avoid was dignity, that terrible term that you're either a buffoon if you're black or you play it with dignity. I hated that idea because I knew that dignity did not make people laugh. I wanted desperately to make people laugh. So I found a way to say what I was going to say in the script without demeaning black people or myself. At the same time, I found a way to do comedy that I don't think many blacks had found before that -- that you could be yourself and make people laugh."

"I had learned to stop focusing so much on what I thought other people were thinking.  And to really try to find some level of truth inside myself in every moment of what I was doing."