Bob Newhart

I would say I came from upper middle class family.

When I started, I was doing all the good comedians I'd ever seen. Then I developed my own voice. My routines are my natural way of looking at the world.

For some reason, comedians are still children. The social skills somehow never reach us, so we say exactly what we think without weighing the results.

With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they've created as themselves. So that when you're in a room with writers, you can say, 'Guys, that's a funny line, but I wouldn't say it.'

I'm not a classically trained actor. I'm not a product of Stavlovski method or anything like that.

I'm not what you'd call a Method actor.

I have an aversion to laugh tracks - the moment I hear a laugh track, I go to another channel.

When I first started out, 'Time' magazine did an article on what it called 'the sick comics,' and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered 'sick.'

I remember seeing a movie with Jose Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney where they were husband and wife, and they got in bed, and he had on polka-dot pajamas and she had on striped pajamas, and when they got up the next morning he had on the striped pajamas and she had the polka dot pajamas, and that was considered racy at that time!

I've had time off, and it drove me nuts. I was crawling up the wall.

I don't think too much about age. Maybe if you're hurting, aching and arthritic, then you think about it a lot. But I don't.

Don't be silly and don't waste your time.