Jonathan Winters Quotations

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.

I know you can be funny without being filthy.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

The most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning - it's a man or a woman without a sense of humor.

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.

I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated. I don't do anything the same every day.

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

Well, the most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning - it's a man or a woman without a sense of humor.

I don't do anything the same every day. Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

I have never pretended to be any kind of super-religious kind of man, but I feel very strongly that you can be funny without being dirty.

Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.

I was always an observer, even as a child. I could be satisfied to sit in a car for 3 hours and just look at the street go by while my mother went shopping.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

I don't do jokes. The characters are my jokes.

My mother and father were very strange people. They tried to be funny which is always very sad to me.

My mother had a radio show - a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.

I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.

I was talking to a businessman, and I said, Don't you think most men are little boys? And he said, I'm no little boy! I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And I said, Well, the way I look at it - you just have bigger toys.

I'm from the Delbert Home for the Unusual.

Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks.

I have a photographic memory; I just haven't developed it yet.

Throughout my life, I've been gratified that I've been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.

God is in my head, but the devil is in my pants.

When you wear so many hats in society, you never know who you are. That's the beauty of it. Because once you find out who you are, you're screwed.

I may not be playing with a full deck but I don't need a full deck. I have four aces.

I've always been proud of being a Marine. I won't hesitate to defend the Corps.