My definition of the truth is whatever I tell you.

Here's a piece of advice my dad gave me: You can get a lot more out of somebody if instead of saying "Let me tell you something!" you ask: "Can I share something with you?"

I should think about that more.

A great party room has a horrible rug that you cannot destroy.

My mother didn't intend to teach me this lesson, but I vividly remember when she told me there wasn't a Santa Claus. I can still see myself lying in bed around Christmas when she said, "You know, Dad and I talked about it and we think you really should know at this point that there's not a Santa Claus." And I was like, "Whaaaaaaat?!" And she said, "Well, how could there be? How could one man really fly all the way around the world with presents for everybody?" And I remember thinking, Then why did you tell me there was? Why set people up for a fall, you know? Isn't that just going to make them cynical?

People sometimes say to me, "Oh, Bill, it's so easy to mock religion." And I always say, "Yes, that's the point." It's not a coincidence that it's a comedically rich target. Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League, wants to fight me again. Literally fight me. Like Mayweather–Pacquiao. Yes, two sixty-year-old men in the parking lot. As Jesus would have wanted...

Laughter is a drug. I remember the first time I performed for real on a stage—a high school talent show. I don't know if I've ever been that high.

One of my show-business lessons is that it never hurts in a talent meeting to show that you're talented.

Some people say there isn't a difference between love and sex. Those people are called women.

I think I know what love is. It's when selfishness goes out of a relationship. That's love. Anything short of that is not.

I feel like I learned more about love when relationships ended. That may have been truer love because we took the sex out of the equation.

Of all the bad things I've done to my body—all the drugs and I smoked for twenty years—for me, nothing is going to be worse than the fact that I lived over a fucking bus stop on Eighth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets for three years, with those early-'80s bus fumes coming through the window. There was a Blimpie across the street. I used to eat there, in the bus fumes, and it's amazing I am talking to you now—it really is. It's a testament to how the human body can repair itself.

You know as much as anybody, very often, about things you may not think you're the expert in.

Bill Gates said, "When you look back on what happened in a two-year period, you always think nothing has changed. But when you look at ten years, everything's changed." I find that to be so true. A two-year period just seems like Mmm, we're stuck. But ten years is unrecognizable. In 2005, we weren't taking pictures of cops beating people up with our phones.

When we talk about disrespect in the comfort of our cushy lives, it's nothing nearly as brutal as what happens to poor black people in the ghetto. I mean there's disrespect, and then there's disrespect at the end of a nightstick.

You're a different person every decade, and every decade you have different needs and desires and values. In my fifties, what became important to me was comfort and acceptance. I wouldn't have said those two things in my twenties.

There are certainly aspects of my life that I would like to take back, but you can't. I've probably spent too much time saying, "Oh, God, I hate myself for doing this or that..." But we're all in a state of evolution.

If you want to be a butterfly, you have to spend some time as a worm.

We can't let ISIS bait us into another giant war the way Al Qaeda did after 9/11. That's what they want. They know the only way they can bring down this giant is by getting him to do something stupid—which is what Al Qaeda did. They got us to invade Iraq. They got us to spend trillions of dollars and only create more terrorists by bombing and droning. Just leave them alone. Mike Huckabee says, "When you see a snake, the way to deal with it is to cut off its head..." I've never had a snake problem that couldn't be solved by distance. Distance. Just walk away. Leave the snake alone.

There's definitely a time when the best you can do is look good for your age.

I always think I'm very lucky, and I don't mean just me. I think I was born in a very sweet spot: after electricity, antibiotics, flush toilets—I wouldn't want to live without any of that—and before the deluge, before the climate changes.

I hope there's no such thing as reincarnation, because I will never pull a better life.

Published in August 2015 issue.

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