[on accommodation, while touring] Cheap hotels in the South and Southwest were apparently set up as bug sanctuaries by some Audubon Society for Insects. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, cockroaches, beetles, scorpions and ants, having no enemies, attacked with fearless abandon. They had the run of the house and they knew it. After a while you just let them bite. Fighting back was useless. For every bug you squashed, a whole fresh, bloodthirsty platoon would march out of the woodwork. In one hotel hotel the ants were so bad that each bed was set on four pots of oxalic acid.

[on performing in vaudeville] If an audience didn't like us we had no trouble finding it out. We were pelted with sticks, bricks, spitballs, cigar butts, peach pits and chewed-out stalks of sugar cane. We took all this without flinching - until Minnie gave us the high-sign that we'd collected our share of the receipts. Then we started throwing stuff back at the audience and run like hell for the railroad station the second the curtain came down.

[describing how he was once thrown out of a New York brothel in the 1920s]: One night I'm playing the harp at this local brothel bar when I felt sick and I practically keeled off the stool. And the Madame says: "Get that son-of-a-bitch back on that stool and play! I've got customers here." So a minute later... again I fell off the stool. She said: "What the hell is the matter with him?" to one of the girls. The prostitute said to the Madame: "He must be sick. I think we should call a doctor." So, they sent for a doctor. Ten minutes later the doctor arrived, he looked at me, and he said to the Madame: "He's got the measles." The Madame said to the doctor: "Then get him the hell out of here. I don't want any sick Jews around me."

[on La soupe au canard (1933)] It was the only time I can remember that I worried about turning in a bad performance. The trouble was not with the script, the director, or the falls I had to take. The trouble was Adolf Hitler. His speeches were being rebroadcast in America. Somebody had a radio on the set, and twice we suspended shooting to listen to him scream.

The man who first inspired me was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theater. He rolled cigars in the window of a cigar store on Lexington Avenue. When he got going good he was completely lost in work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves. Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I've thrown in a Gookie at least once.

[on comedy playwright George S. Kaufman] He had great integrity. You never had to watch him when he was dealing.

[on visiting Hamburg, Germany, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power]: "I saw the most frightening, most depressing sight I had ever seen - a row of stores with Stars of David and the word 'Jude' painted on them, and inside, behind half-empty counters, people in a daze, cringing like they didn't know what hit them and didn't know where the next blow would come from. Hitler had been in power only six months, and his boycott was already in full effect. I hadn't been so wholly conscious of being a Jew since my bar mitzvahs, and it was the first time since I'd had the measles that I was too sick to eat."

I am the most fortunate self-taught harpist and non-speaking actor who has ever lived.

But I guess that's the way it is. When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost. you mourn for yourself.

[When asked how many children he'd like to have]: "So many that whenever we go out, there can be one in every window, waving to us."

If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.