Phil Hartman Quotations

One of the remarkable things about my career is that it has been marked by steady, incremental progress. No sudden spikes up, and no sudden downfalls, either.

As an actor, I felt I couldn't compete. I wasn't as cute as the leading man; I wasn't as brilliant as Robin Williams.

I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams - financially and the amount of fun I have in my life.

The one thing I could do was voices and impersonations and weird characters, and there was really no call for that, except on Saturday Night Live.

My brothers and sisters and I spoke in a language called Egg Latin. In the early '50s in Canada, this became a fad way of talking among certain people. It's based on the concept that in every syllable before the vowel and after the preceding constant you insert the word 'egg.' So, my name Phil would be 'Pegghil.'

I benefit from the Mr. Potato Head syndrome. Put a wig and a nose and glasses on me, and I disappear.

I think there's a notion in our society, and it may be valid, that people aren't as funny when they get older. It's a stigma still attached to the rebelliousness of youth.

Even at Westchester High in West LA, I was class clown.

'Blasto' is a new game for Sony Playstation. It's an awesome three-dimensional game, and I play the character Blasto who's sort of a Flash Gordon barrel-chested superhero who goes to Uranus and shoots these little green alien Fascist guys. He rescues babes; he goes on wild rides.

I think my most famous was 'Poco's Legend.' It's a white album with a simple line drawing of a horse. It almost has a Picasso feel to it. I remember that Rusty Young, the lead singer of the band, said, 'I want you to draw a horse for the song 'Legend,' which is about a phantom spirit horse. I want you to do it in several lines.'

I was 36, and I had decided to quit acting because it was so disappointing.

I found the writing arena to be much less competitive.

I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.

I'm a really big fan of Bill Murray.

It's fun coming in as the second or third lead. If the movie or TV show bombs, you aren't to blame.

Wonderful Canadian family who gave me free Canadian Scotch daily,

What we can do is try to encourage the idea that the East Village is as much a place as a state of mind ... So hopefully the community can be understood by anyone with the right attitude, be they from Hoboken or Tokyo.

I got my uniform and my belts and I wanted to learn how to salute.

But what if our Internet was down? What if we lost our building and had to set up in a school gymnasium? We could get computers, but we couldn't get computers with the configuration settings we need in a timely manner. And if we can't set up our medical records data, we can't see patients, which means we're in trouble, especially in a disaster scenario.

We were doing tape backups. But with the hurricanes, we started to think about what would happen if we lost the whole building -- and how we were going to get our systems back, not just our data.

I should have been a general a long time ago instead of shining a seat with my ass in Washington D.C. But, thanks to a certain master sergeant, I had a career reversal 20 years ago,

After working in the corporate world of advertising and graphic design, I know how hard the average person works, because I've been there.

Actually, an old printing press building that had been fortified.

A master sergeant in the Army is in danger of losing his lavish lifestyle when a Pentagon official threatens to close Fort Baxter,

There's been a lot of development in the neighborhood, a lot of gentrification, a lot of artists have been forced out, a lot of venues have been closed down, and we really wanted to assert the fact that we're still here and there's still amazing stuff going on down here. The festival is simultaneously looking back at this great cultural legacy, but looking forward because we want to create opportunities for the next generation of visionaries to flourish right here.

It's a reward for the whole music department and community because we've been able to put this together.

It was literally a situation where you felt the most unbridled glory and the most excruciating emotional agony. What's the line -- laugh all your laughter, cry all your tears? And revel in the glory of it all,

I recently made a list of all the characters and voices I've done. It came to 99,

Howl has certainly proved that the East Village sense of community has survived intact,

For the first time in 19 years we'll be able to perform on our own stage instead of some place else.

It's been five years worth of planning and negotiating to bring this to a reality.

Marines die, that's what we're here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever. And that means YOU live forever.

I could never learn what I'm learning at college. They don't teach it there, because it can't be learned in that way.

The chief would tell him, 'We certainly do. You get your butt back here safely.'

The first thing I said to him is 'I guess I owe you a few apologies,' ... He laughed and was just very warm and gracious.