Mark Russell quotes:

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

People are not in a good mood when any politician's face appears on television.

Rush has done some top-notch quality work, and we're very, very pleased with them. We really enjoy working with them. They are on time and on budget, which makes me happy.

I believe that Bill Clinton's second term will be good for business... my business!

Believe me when I say that Bill Clinton's second term will be good for business. My business.

The way money goes so fast these days, they should paint racing stripes on it.

You know that a given in life in human nature, is that at a sporting event, a baseball game, a football game, you never introduce a politician, is because he'll be booed. I don't care if he's the most beloved person in the world, its part of the game.

The Republicans have a new healthcare proposal: Just say NO to illness!

Humor is very very risky, particularly for a candidate, unless he's been in so long that it just doesn't matter, and he's not running for president. But it's just that people are so sensitive and so touchy, and you're just going to upset somebody without ever realizing it.

You've got the brain-washed, that's the Democrats, and the brain-dead, that's the Republicans!

Being an Olympian is the ultimate test of one's sporting ability.

I'll keep doing it until I die or the audiences die.

You know when Jerry Ford gets the best joke, you know you're in trouble.

A Consultant is a guy who knows 125 different ways to make love, but who doesn't know any women.

If you call your opponent a politician, it's grounds for libel.

I think you can't write with anger. I think it always has to be with a wink. There always has to be an element of hope in what you write. Otherwise you're just getting mad and it's not going to be fun for anybody.

I do jokes about what's funny, and both sides are funny.

The thing that you're faulted on today is not that you are too tough, or not that you aren't careful. It's that you might have been too soft. People want that red meat now because you have to keep up with the mood and the mood today is harsh. It really is.

I can't think of a performer who is better on television than in person.

I squirm when I see athletes praying before a game. Don't they realize that if God took sports seriously he never would have created George Steinbrenner.

I think even the characters that are fundamentally evil and wrong, I want people to really love them. I think that's important to writing believable characters. They don't have to be likable but they have to be loved, at least by the author.

If the audience doesn't like it, usually they're just silent. But they've never all walked out at once.

I'm not trying to write a bleak and blistering screed against American civilization. I'm writing something that I hope is fun and satirical and full of possibility.

The sacred exists only at the expense of the truth.

You have the establishment and then you have the hippies revolting against the establishment, and what you end up getting are like accountants with long hair. And that's kind of what happened with the youth movement in the '70s.

You have to imbue the characters with their own sort of feeling of justification and morality. Everyone has that, whether we see them as evil or not. So I try to bring the characters to life by making them likable or lovable, in the sense that they can be, at least to themselves.

Young people, take heart: the older you get, the fewer commandments you will have the strength to break.