You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

A word to the wise ain`t necessary - it`s the stupid ones that need the advice.

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who`ve had luck with it and those who haven`t.

A word to the wise ain`t necessary, it`s the stupid ones who need the advice.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

I don`t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

When you become senile, you won`t know it.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

The truth is that parents are not really interested in justice. They just want quiet.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

Parents are not quite interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don`t believe the kids should be given homework

[On his murdered son, Ennis} He was my hero.

Because of my father, I thought my name was Jesus Christ. My brother Russell thought that his name was Dammit.

[commenting that many young actors don`t give their parents proper credit] I`m still waiting for some actor to win, say, an Oscar . . . and deliver the following acceptance speech: "I would like to thank my parents, first of all, for letting me live."

What best defines a child is the total inability to receive information from anything not plugged in.

If you`re a parent, the five worst words you can say to your children are, "When I was your age . . . " You were NEVER their age. You were older in the womb.

Kids will spend $500 on sneakers but won`t spend $200 on "Hooked-on-Phonics".

Don`t worry about senility--when it hits you, you won`t know it.

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

[on Detroit`s large population of people in poverty] When I come back and come back and come back I`m making a statement that this is for real. You`re about to listen, absorb and to challenge yourself to move in a positive direction. Strength, that`s what we`re after.

Phil Woods said the following: Death is the last thing he wants to do. Don`t worry about it! You don`t worry about what`s going to be the last thing. You know you`re going to be dead. So do I. And if I go before you, am I worried? No. Jealous? Yeah.

No parent must ever say, "Get the kids out of here, I`m trying to watch TV." The father who does start saying this is likely to see one of his children on the 6:00 news."

A word to the wise ain`t necessary -- it`s the stupid ones who need the advice.

[speaking in Washington, DC, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that eradicated segregated schooling in America] These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we`ve got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids--$500 sneakers for what? I can`t even talk the way these people talk, "Why you ain`t," "Where you is?" You can`t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!

[on "The Cosby Show" (1984)] I wanted to give the house back to the parents.

I can tell you, from experience, that whoever said "Children and fools cannot lie" was one or the other himself. There`s only one way to guarantee that your children are telling the truth: limit your questions to the names of their schools.

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.

I don`t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

[On the failure of his experimental educational/variety show, "Cos" (1976)] My first series ["I Spy" (1965)] ran three years, my second ["The Bill Cosby Show" (1969)] ran two years and my third ["The New Bill Cosby Show" (1972)] ran one. This show, if I`m lucky, will run the 13 weeks we contracted for.

My mother and father ate oink. And they loved oink grease. Lard is what they ate. And they soaked up grease with a biscuit. And they loved butter too. And they sopped up and drank and ate grease. Sausage. Bacon. Ham. They loved it. Fatback. Salt pork. Oink. And I was born with lard all on my head, in the cracks of my arms and the back of my leg. So now my cholesterol is 741. So what? It doesn`t bother me that it`s 741. You eat what I eat, it`s supposed to be. Every once in awhile my left arm will go numb. Okay. But if you shake it, it`ll go away.

Gray hair is God`s graffiti.

I don`t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.

Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come home.

It`s the little things that count when you`re a daddy. Like taking your little girl for ice cream. First, you have to teach her about the concept of gravity. I can`t tell you how many ice creams I`ve had to pick up off the floor, rinse off and stick back on my kid`s cone. Now that may sound strange, but have you bought ice cream lately? Good gosh, it`s up to 75 cents a scoop. A scoop! What`s in it, gold?

The problem is that your daughter has given her heart to a 15-year-old boy, and a 15-year-old boy does not yet qualify as a human being.

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.