Quotes

[from an interview done in 1998] I'm in perpetual pain. I have arthritis, you know and, uh, I don't want to really go into it. People are not interested in my woes. They say old people talk about nothing but what ails them, you know. I lost many friends by talking incessantly about my pain. They're not interested in my pain.

[from an interview in 1998] If you said to me, "Theodore, we pay you $20,000 and you perform at Town Hall." I might be able to do it and afterwards, simply drop dead. The alternative is to lie safely in my bed and don't perform and have to wait four or five years in utter loneliness and in great pain and confusion. So I might take the risk to do it once and say, "O.K., so I die after the show." But it's better to have the applause and die than to lie here for the next five years and end up in a nursing home forever and ever and ever.

Women here get away with murder. In Europe we keep them pregnant and barefooted and let them eat under the table!

You are asking dangerous questions, which provokes dangerous answers!

I'm a controversial figure, people either hate me or despise me...

My Momsie and my Popsie died several years before I was born.

Evil that fails is Evil, but Evil that succeeds is GOOD!

I'm a very warm and sensitive person, I'm a pig with butterfly wings, but every time I come here you know in some hidden way how to DRIVE ME OUT OF MY MIND!

God created David Letterman for practice! Then he created the Amoeba!

I'm not really what you could call a Dreamboat, or even a Tugboat...

I have gazed into the Abyss, and the Abyss has gazed back at me, and neither of us liked what we saw!

We are not prisoners of Logic, here, I know that. But let's not get too sloppy in our thinking, please.

I shouldn't try to sell roses in a fishmarket!

A roomful of pigs ganging up on the one Butterfly!

I have always aimed at Nothing, and I have always hit it!

When the Power is Upon Me there is no holding me back, I just let loose.

I'm a Somebody in a Century of Nobodies.

I've been fishing in waterless rivers for fish that do not exist.

I wanted to be a contented pinworm, not a tormented Brother Theodore, but I never had any choice in the matter

Go and see 'Burbs, or I'll come to your home one of these nights, and you won't enjoy it!

Sir, may I remind you with a voice COLD WITH LOATHING that you are facing Brother Theodore, and I wonder whether you know who I am!

We measure things by what we are.

Oh, God, who died on the Cross for my sins, what have I done with my life?

[repeated line] It is too late to apologise...

Thou self-appointed Kangaroo! I love to you, and I'm going to give it to you good and hot, and smack in the Entertainment Centre!

To me the most nourishing part of the Apple is the Worm. A worm a day keeps the Doctor away! Two worms a day keeps two Doctors away! Three worms a day keeps three Doctors away! Four worms a day keeps four Doctors away! 2645 worms a day keeps 2645 Doctors away, at a conservative guess!

Lizalotta Bindle, as common a name in my country as David Letterman, we were cousins. We grew up together in my parents mansion in the forests of Bavaria.