Quotes from Steven Wright

Winny would spend all of his time practicing limbo. He got pretty good. He could go under a rug.

I have a quantum car. Every time I look at the speedometer I get lost.

My grandfather gave me a watch. It doesn't have any hands or numbers. He says it's very accurate. I asked him what time it was. You can guess what he told me.

You know how it is when you go to be the subject of a psychology experiment and nobody else shows up and you think maybe that's part of the experiment? I'm like that all the time.

It was the first time I was ever in love, and I learned a lot. Before that I'd never even thought about killing myself.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm the only one moving.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring... 'How to Build a Boat.'

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me - to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That's normally how I perform. That's how I am.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, 'Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.'

I don't go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it's contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it?

I saw a tree fall in the woods, and I didn't hear it.

Should you trust a stockbroker who's married to a travel agent?

Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it's dangerous.

I love eating chocolate cake and ice cream after a show. I almost justify it in my mind as, 'You were a good boy onstage and you did your show, so now you can have some cake and ice cream.'

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I'm not an improv guy. I'm a writer-guy who presents what he's written.

Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal... 'Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?'

Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.

Honestly, I just go to restaurants to eat so I won't die. If there was a pill I could take in January and then I wouldn't have to eat again for the rest of the year, I would take it. Of course, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my chocolate cake and ice cream.

I never even thought of myself as deadpan until someone wrote an article about me about a year after I was doing comedy. There was a paper called the 'Boston Phoenix,' and someone wrote a description of what I was doing and that's where I first saw 'deadpan.'

When I was on TV in the '80s, I wasn't thinking, 'There's a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he's gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.' I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they're influenced by me - it's bizarre.

I've been doing comedy longer than I haven't been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on 'The Tonight Show.' There's truly nothing like it; it's intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.