Best 24 quotes of Jonathan Winters on MyQuotes

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.

Discipline is tough for a guy who is a rebel.

God is in my head, but the devil is in my pants.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

I don't paint every day. I'm not that motivated. I don't do anything the same every day.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.

I have never pretended to be any kind of super-religious kind of man, but I feel very strongly that you can be funny without being dirty.

I love improvisation. You can't blame it on the writers. You can't blame it on direction. You can't blame it on the camera guy... It's you. You're on. You've got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you've got.

I may not be playing with a full deck but I don't need a full deck. I have four aces.

I'm from the Delbert Home for the Unusual.

I've done for the most part pretty much what I intended - I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I've had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.

I was always an observer, even as a child. I could be satisfied to sit in a car for 3 hours and just look at the street go by while my mother went shopping.

I was talking to a businessman, and I said, Don't you think most men are little boys? And he said, I'm no little boy! I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year. And I said, Well, the way I look at it - you just have bigger toys.

My mother had a radio show - a Barbara Walters type of gal and was very successful for about 20-some years on a radio station.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.

Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks.

Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when you think about it.

Throughout my life, I've been gratified that I've been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.

You've got to be an observer. And you've got to take time to listen to people, talk, to watch what they do.

If your ship doesn’t come in, Swim out to meet it!

You come into this world, not knowing who you are, and sometimes, if you live long enough, you go out not knowing who you are.