For everything this disease has taken, something with greater value has been given--sometimes just a marker that points me in a new direction that I might not otherwise have traveled. So, sure, it may be one step forward and two steps back, but after a time with Parkinson's, I've learned that what is important is making that one step count; always looking up.

No matter how much fame you have, it’s not something that belongs to you. If I’m famous, that doesn’t belong to me -- that belongs to you. If you can’t remember who I am, I’m no longer famous.

The secret to a good marriage, as far as I am concerned, is a joke I make: Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty.

My point is, and our point as a community, is we have a very good and supportable conclusion that a vast majority of people in this country are in favor of science playing a leading role in making changes in the future and believe in embryonic stem cell research. So we're just saying, know that we have prayed on it, too, and we have thought about it, and we are good people, and we are family people, and we are people that take this very seriously, and we're as concerned as you are. And we've decided that we would like to take this step and to do it with caution and to do it with oversight and to do it with the strictest adherence to ethics and all of the principles this country stands for. But, allow us to do that without infusing the conversation with inflammatory rhetoric and name-calling and fear-mongering. It doesn't help.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. Acceptance is the key to everything.

With Parkinson's, it's like you're in the middle of the street and you're stuck there in cement shoes and you know a bus is coming at you, but you don't know when. You think you can hear it rumbling, but you have a lot of time to think. And so you just don't live that moment of the bus hitting you until it happens. There's all kinds of room in that space.

I love my life I have a great life I have a great family and, um, I just kind of stumbled out of this thing that once I was diagnosed in '91 with PD and I kinda kept it a secret for like 7 years and it was a lot of time to work it out. I did a lot of stupid things, I drank too much, I kinda got crazy with it. It's not like I burst out of a coccoon of ignorance and all of a sudden had a handle on it, but it's like anything, once you accept it and you fix it in space and you say this is this and this isn't anything else, this is not going to go away anytime soon and I have to deal with it, then you start to open up to all of the stuff thats around it and you say, wow, this gives me an opportunity to help people out, this gives me an opportunity to look at things in a way that I might not have looked at them before and to kind of be a little more serious than the jackass I've been for the past 35 years and writing books and a new kind of appreciation for my family and a relationship with my kids, where I don't have to kind of teach them lessons, hoping they'll pick up things from the way they see me deal with [it].

My tattoo is that I don’t have a tattoo.

There are no moments you have frozen in amber. It's moving, it's changing, so appreciate what's good about right now and be ready for what's next.

Comedy is like a frog--you can dissect it, you learn how it works, but it will die in the process. So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.

If you don’t have someone calling you on your shit, you’re lost.

Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone’s watching or not.

Look at the choices you have, as opposed to the choices that have been taken away from you. Because in those choices, there are whole worlds of strength and new ways to look at things.

Life is what you put into it and how much you take out of it. You put in more than is expected, and you take out less than you want.

When I first publicly acknowledged my diagnosis, people would look at me in the eye, trying to find some kind of fear, and what they would see is their own fear reflected back at them. The bottom line is what you have to deal with is people's fear of being ill, fear of being generally compromised, fear of being outside of the circle of able-bodied people. I was given the opportunity to introduce some of the things that are frightening and say, "Here's a guy who's living with it and laughing with it and going on with his life."

I started golf in my forties, which is the ultimate optimism.