Top 100 Johnny Carson Quotes
#1. People are hypocrites. If you ask them what they want to see on TV, they'll tell you they want better quality programming. And then what do they watch? 'Gilligan's Island.'
Johnny Carson
#2. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace.
Johnny Carson
#3. I have no use for eight houses, 88 cars and 500 suits. I can't eat but one steak at a time. I don't want but one woman. It's silly to have as one's sole object in life just making money, accumulating wealth.
Johnny Carson
#4. You become successful, the way I see it, only if you're good enough to deliver what the public enjoys. If you're not, you won't have any audience; so the performer really has more to do with his success than the public does.
Johnny Carson
#5. I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.
Johnny Carson
#6. I couldn't care less what anybody says about me. I live my life, especially my personal life, strictly for myself ... Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized. I feel the one sensible thing you can do is try to live in a way that pleases you.
Johnny Carson
#7. I don't run with anybody's herd. I don't like crowds. I don't like going to fancy places. I don't like the whole nightclub scene. Cocktail parties drive me mad. So I do my job and I stay away from the rest of it.
Johnny Carson
#8. I owe one thing to my public - the best performance I can give.
Johnny Carson
#10. Air Canada. That's a good name for a Canadian airline.
Johnny Carson
#11. Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.
Johnny Carson
#12. NBC's a little jealous of CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. They want to get a reporter with a macho-sounding name too, so they're changing Irving R. Levine's name to Scud Shrapnel.
Johnny Carson
#13. I know you've been married to the same woman for 69 years. That is marvelous. It must be very inexpensive.
Johnny Carson
#14. Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies - outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn't do themselves.
Johnny Carson
#15. Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.
Johnny Carson
#16. New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
Johnny Carson
#17. Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.
Johnny Carson
#18. George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?
Johnny Carson
#19. The Hollywood tradition I like best is called sucking up to the stars.
Johnny Carson
#20. Entertainment is like any other major industry; it's cold, big business. The business end wants to know one thing: Can you do the job? If you can, you're in, you're made; if you can't, you're out.
Johnny Carson
#21. Never ask your wife if she still hears from her old pimp.
Johnny Carson
#22. Never marry a girl named 'Marie' who used to be known as 'Murray'.
Johnny Carson
#23. I am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it.
Johnny Carson
#24. I play my life straight - the way I see it. I'm grateful to audiences for watching me and for enjoying what I do - but I'm not one of those who believe that a successful entertainer is made by the public, as is so often said.
Johnny Carson
#25. I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.
Johnny Carson
#26. As you all know by now, this is the 51st annual Academy Awards. Two hours of sparkling entertainment spread out over a four-hour show.
Johnny Carson
#27. I hear that whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.
Johnny Carson
#28. The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.
Johnny Carson
#29. The closest thing to Roseanne Barr's singing the national anthem was my cat being neutered.
Johnny Carson
#30. Who cares what entertainers on the air think about international affairs? Who would want to hear me about Vietnam? They can hear all they want from people with reason to be respected as knowledgeable.
Johnny Carson
#31. The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.
Johnny Carson
#32. I'm an entertainer; I try to give the public what it wants while I'm on the screen, and I'm completely sincere about it. If I don't happen to be a laughing boy off the screen, that doesn't make me a hypocrite or a phony.
Johnny Carson
#33. Whatever you do, you're going to be criticized.
Johnny Carson
#34. I can empathize with President [George Bush]. I know what it feels like having a young guy waiting around for you to keel over.
Johnny Carson
#35. Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead.
Johnny Carson
#36. If life were fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
Johnny Carson
#37. I can't go anywhere without being bugged by somebody. I'd love to just hike out down the street, or drop in a restaurant, or wander in the park, or take my kids somewhere without collecting a trail of people. But I can't.
Johnny Carson
#38. Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.
Johnny Carson
#39. Happiness is seeing the muscular lifeguard all the girls were admiring leave the beach hand in hand with another muscular lifeguard.
Johnny Carson
#40. I see a lot of new faces. Especially on the old faces.
Johnny Carson
#41. I wouldn't have the slightest interest in running for public office. I'd rather make jokes about politicians than become one of them.
Johnny Carson
#42. If life was fair, Elvis would still be alive and all the impersonators dead.
Johnny Carson
#43. Pie throwing is kind of a lost art, and although it may be a rather rudimentary, burlesque humor, there's something inherently funny about taking a pie in the face, under the right conditions.
Johnny Carson
#44. We have two kinds of air: regular and chunky style.
Johnny Carson
#45. I am taking the applause sign home, putting it in the bedroom.
Johnny Carson
#46. If God didn't want man to hunt, He wouldn't have given us plaid shirts.
Johnny Carson
#47. As long as I don't commit any crimes, you have no right to judge me except by my performance as a professional. On that level, you're welcome to think whatever you want about me.
Johnny Carson
#48. People pay more to be entertained that educated
Johnny Carson
#49. Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.
Johnny Carson
#50. I've worked ever since I was a kid with a two-bit kit of magic tricks trying to improve my skills at entertaining whatever public I had - and to make myself ready, whenever the breaks came, to entertain a wider and more demanding public.
Johnny Carson
#51. Having money gives me the freedom to worry about the things that really matter.
Johnny Carson
#52. Happiness is being stuck in an elevator and discovering the ravishing blonde with you is a liquor salesman with a case of samples.
Johnny Carson
#53. When the public starts classifying you as thoughtful, someone given to serious issues, you find yourself declassified as a humorist.
Johnny Carson
#54. Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.
Johnny Carson
#55. My success just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each day.
Johnny Carson
#56. What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?
Johnny Carson
#57. According to statistics, it's a lot easier to get hit by lightning than to win a Lotto jackpot. The good side: you don't hear from your relatives.
Johnny Carson
#59. The Champagne they have stored is getting more valuable every year.
Johnny Carson
#60. I think it's almost immoral to keep on with a marriage that's really bad. It just gets more and more rotten and vindictive and everybody gets more and more hurt. There's not enough honesty about marriage, I think. I wish more people would face the truth about their marital situations.
Johnny Carson
#61. Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.
Johnny Carson
#62. Everybody I meet in public seems to want to audition for me. If I ask a guy what time it is, he'll sing it to me.
Johnny Carson
#63. Asked how he became a star, Mr. Carson once replied, I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.
Johnny Carson
#64. Talent alone won't make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: 'Are your ready?'
Johnny Carson
#65. In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
Johnny Carson
#66. A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.
Johnny Carson
#67. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.
Johnny Carson
#68. As for being sociable, I hate the phoniness in the showbiz world. I know this will be taken wrong, but I don't like clubs and organizations. I was never a joiner.
Johnny Carson
#69. I'm an entertainer, not a commentator. If you're a comedian your job is to make people laugh.
Johnny Carson
#70. People are brought up to think, "It's nice to be modest. It's nice to hide your light under a bushel." Well, bullshit! I've never bought that. In my business, the only thing you've really got is your talent; it's the only thing you have to sell.
Johnny Carson
#71. Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college.
Johnny Carson
#72. Desire! That's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being born with hidden talents. Desire.
Johnny Carson
#73. Audiences have proved time and again that they don't want a steady diet of any entertainer airing his social views - especially if he's a comedian.
Johnny Carson
#74. I hated my last boss. He asked, Why are you two hours late? I said, I fell downstairs. He said, That doesn't take two hours.
Johnny Carson
#75. I get sick of that old rationalization, "We're staying together because of the children." Kids couldn't be more miserable living with parents who can't stand each other. They're far better off if there's an honest, clean divorce.
Johnny Carson
#76. There are very few Japanese Jews. As a result, there is no Japanese word for Alan King.
Johnny Carson
#77. The only issue cash presents you is the independence of not stressing about funds.
Johnny Carson
#78. I never analyze it. Analyzing it would just be a waste of time. I just go out and do it.
Johnny Carson
#79. I work because I enjoy what I'm doing, and the fact that I make money at it - big money - is a fine-and-dandy side fact.
Johnny Carson
#80. Pittsburgh is kind of like Newark without the cultural advantages.
Johnny Carson
#81. Money gives me just one big thing that's really important, and that's the freedom of not having to worry about money.
Johnny Carson
#82. An oxymoron? What's that? A moron who studies at Oxford?
Johnny Carson
#83. Do you know my dream? I really want to become an aluminum-siding salesman.
Johnny Carson
#84. Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.
Johnny Carson
#85. I heard from my cat's lawyer today; my cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.
Johnny Carson
#86. We're more effective than birth control pills.
Johnny Carson
#87. In 1932, lame duck president Herbert Hoover was so desperate to remain in the White House that he dressed up as Eleanor Roosevelt. When FDR discovered the hoax in 1936, the two men decided to stay together for the sake of the children.
Johnny Carson
#88. Happiness is being served with a paternity suit on your 75th birthday.
Johnny Carson
#90. The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in it's ear.
Johnny Carson
#91. When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.
Johnny Carson
#92. May you have the income of a Republican and the sex life of a Democrat!
Johnny Carson
#93. The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.
Johnny Carson
#94. Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.
Johnny Carson
#95. There's a lot of hypocrisy in audiences. I'd never dream of telling even on a nightclub stage, let alone my show, some of the jokes that are told in a lot of the living rooms from which we get those letters!
Johnny Carson
#96. From the time I was a little kid, I was always shy. Performing was when I was outgoing. So I guess I am a loner. I get claustrophobia if a lot of people are around.
Johnny Carson
#97. We resort, frankly, to pies, which is a comedy staple that's gone back, I guess, to since the first pie was ever baked.
Johnny Carson
#98. Ronald Reagan just signed the new tax law. But I think he was in Hollywood too long. He signed it, 'Best wishes, Ronald Reagan.'
Johnny Carson
#99. How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?
Johnny Carson
#100. I know a guy who gave up smoking cigarettes, consuming, sex, and wealthy meals.
Johnny Carson
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