Jerry Lewis Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“When I hit around 65, 66, I started to feel tremendous worth and incredible personal esteem. I was becoming very cognisant of my contribution to the American spirit of helping your fellow man and all of the good stuff.”

“I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.”

“I tell young comics, 'Do you want this badly enough? It's there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I'm going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.'”

“I've had the greatest respect for my work in this country by Americans. Critics have no brains.”

“If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.”

“A woman doing comedy doesn't offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”

“People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.”

“A lot of people resent that I've been in someone's life for 50 years. Why shouldn't people have an affection for me and what I've done? Didn't I have to be genuine for them to buy into what I did? There are children who grow up today who will not have that when they're 55 years old. With whom will they have it? Name an example for me.”

“The young man who's had the Guggenheim fortune behind him all his life - he can hire all the authorities on the subject to teach him how to do a monologue, but he's never going to have the right stuff to pull it off. If he doesn't walk out onstage needing to walk out there, he doesn't have a dream of doing well.”

“Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.”