David Steinberg quotes:

I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

My influences were Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce.

On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' it takes almost a year to get 10 shows written. It always reminds me of my old yeshiva days, where you used to sit over a piece of Talmud and analyze everything that was going on.

Being a lawyer in New York sucks because you're working eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week.

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.

The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile.

I started writing this feature comedy in New York - a Chris Farley vehicle. The script was decent. When I got to LA, I met some new friends in film school and had them read my script and give me notes.

I used to have a theory actually that, if you've had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you're going to make a lousy comedian.

Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.

The whole idea of doing the Hollywood thing never even occurred to me. When you grow up on the East coast, Hollywood seems like this fantasy land and you don't think that people can actually make a living there.

And it was a huge emotional thing to leave the law and become unemployed - to be a student again.

I don't really dissect comedy. Nothing kills off humor more than overanalyzing it.

Silences are the most underrated part of comedy.

In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

The odd thing about comedy is that the more personal you are, the larger the audience.