Jerry Seinfeld Quotes

I'm a big believer than a great bit is a great bit - if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein. I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they're beautiful things when they're done.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating - is this the exact right mix? I think that's - to me it's anti-comedy. It's more about PC-nonsense.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I have this old '57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I'll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, 'cluh-CLICK-click.' That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that's what I'm into.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I like definitive things.

- Jerry Seinfeld

There's different kinds of laughs. It's like a baseball lineup: this guy's your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we're gonna win.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is... trapped.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Pay attention, don't let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You know you're getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It's like, 'See if you can blow this out.'

- Jerry Seinfeld

The IRS! They're like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!

- Jerry Seinfeld

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for 'Automobile Magazine.' I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I'm more proud of that than anything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Well, Howard Stern has been doing his impression of me for years. It doesn't really bother me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I don't need you to be funny. I don't want to be entertained.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We've fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

- Jerry Seinfeld

That's the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.

- Jerry Seinfeld

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

- Jerry Seinfeld

For me, it's a purity thing about the joke itself. It's a test of a joke whether or not you do it completely clean and it works. If it does, then that's a legitimate item you have there. For me, it's nothing to do with finding those words offensive. It's just not what I'm in search of. Do it clean, and you are really earning that laugh.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they're all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You want to do good things, and once you've done a couple of good things in a row, you think 'Well gee, let's not mess this up.' But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We want to do a lot of stuff; we're not in great shape. We didn't get a good night's sleep. We're a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If you go to a bad movie, it's two hours. If you're in a bad movie, it's two years.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There's entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That's when you know the most, you've seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it's kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the '60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You spend so much time in the world of virtual that the actual - which nothing is more actual than stand-up - it's a painful experience for the audience, and the comedian a lot of time - we miss that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

When someone does a small task beautifully, their whole environment is affected by it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it's my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I don't want to hear the specials. If they're so special, put 'em on the menu.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I've done a number of Super Bowl ads. And that is the best advertising of the year. That is when people realize they're going to be compared directly against other ads.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Funny is the world I live in. You're funny, I'm interested. You're not funny, I'm not interested.

- Jerry Seinfeld

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My parents didn't want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that's the law.

- Jerry Seinfeld

We sold 'Seinfeld' all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic - you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

- Jerry Seinfeld

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Make no mistake about why these babies are here - they are here to replace us.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I am so busy doing nothing... that the idea of doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn't have that kind of personality, and it's a terrifying thing to say.

- Jerry Seinfeld

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don't get that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I can walk through a hotel lobby and watch people at the desk and see what they're doing. People don't look at me. They don't even know I'm there.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I don't want to be too critical of what other people do, but when people go back to do the same thing that they did, I'm completely confused. I'm like, 'Didn't you make that movie already?' I've been very fortunate, and I'm well taken care of, so the least I can do is try to go forward.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If you get something right, you really feel it, right in your chest, on stage. I think it's an incomparable experience.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

- Jerry Seinfeld

To me, if life boils down to one thing, it's movement. To live is to keep moving.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That's why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, 'Bye!'

- Jerry Seinfeld

The Internet offers opportunities that are more unique than ever before. With TV, I know I'm making 22 minutes; I know there's a commercial in the middle. With the Internet, no one knows anything. No rules.

- Jerry Seinfeld

When you make a TV show, they always say you're a guest in someone's home. Online, you're a guest in someone's face. So that's why I try to make it sound and look and feel very inviting and attractive, because I know that I'm in your face.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

- Jerry Seinfeld

When you're in comedy, people always come up and say, 'Oh, it must be so hard.' It really isn't hard unless you're not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I think it's funny to be delicate with subjects that are explosive.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I'll tell you one thing, since I'm married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

- Jerry Seinfeld

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I'm doing new stuff all the time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You don't even really need a place. But you feel like you're doing something. That is what coffee is. And that is one of the geniuses of the new coffee culture.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Nobody enjoys the 'little show about nothing' humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

- Jerry Seinfeld

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don't really think most people really understand what they've seen.

- Jerry Seinfeld

There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men don't think there's a lot they don't know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, 'I know what I'm doing, just show me somebody naked.'

- Jerry Seinfeld

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

- Jerry Seinfeld

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you're into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.

- Jerry Seinfeld

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Stand-up is hard.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I won't do something unless I can get at least two or three good laughs out of it. If I can't, it's not gonna make the team.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You know, crankiness is at the essence of all comedy.

- Jerry Seinfeld

If you're a surfer, you just want to surf. You don't know if anyone's going to see you, and you don't really care if they see you. You just live for that feeling.

- Jerry Seinfeld

You can be passionate about anything.

- Jerry Seinfeld

A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.

- Jerry Seinfeld

Men like a ref decision because they just want to get back to the game.

- Jerry Seinfeld

I love being a dad. I just love it.

- Jerry Seinfeld