Don Rickles Quotes

I knew already when I was seven years old, that I wanted to be on stage and entertain people. I sell laughs. Here, you got one for free!

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

My gigs are built on improvisation: I go out there and I'm like the Energizer bunny.

Stand-up is still my job. That is the thing I wanted to get into when I was 21. You cannot beat the immediacy of it, making people laugh without any interruptions or edits.

When you do see me, you'll get the idea from when you see me that it's all off the top of my head. A lot of it is a beginning, middle and the end. But it's different every night. I have a lot of jokes in my back pocket I've said over the years.

There's nothing like watching a live performance of, frankly, anything. You have to make sure that people believe everything is improvised. I could not stress enough how little we [actors] prepare and what small amount of time we put in before these shows.

I love working on the fly when the writers come up with new jokes on show nights. It's exciting. I love it so much.

There are jokes I know I want to tell, and there's sort of a rough order, but usually I try to change it up every show, to improvise and talk with the audience. I think when you tell jokes, if you're not careful, you can end up telling the whole list of jokes and then that's it. And that can get a little boring.

In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.

I'm trying to be a comedian, you know?

I'm traveling the world, ripping rooms apart with my stupendous comedy.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

The beautiful thing about stand-up is you can create and immediately deliver, perform, and get paid for what you do.

I've been a live performer longer than I've been a television performer. For me, live is where it's at.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.

Stand-up, for me, is really more of an addiction, so you have to feed the beast whenever you can.

I never used to tell jokes on stage. Now I'm cutting up jokes all night long.

Stand-up was like being on a Barbie townhouse stage.

I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do.

I like doing stand-up and I love putting out TV specials.

I gravitated toward stand-up because there's no overhead. I mean, literally, there's no overhead: Often, you're outdoors performing in front of groups of people.

I came away from 'Saturday Night Live' feeling very well represented. I felt, and I still feel like, they let me do so much stuff that I wanted to do. Stuff that I almost didn't even know what it was.

Stand-up keeps you on your toes because it's instant. With TV and movies, you have to wait for the numbers to come in to see what happened at the box office. With stand-up, it's right there, that night, in your face.