Explore Quotes by Dana Carvey

I have no regrets. I wanted to raise the kids and be a present father. When I developed a movie, I was gone for a year. That didn't really work for me. That isn't fair to make these life-forms and then disappear.

I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.

I'm more of a people pleaser.

That's why modern corporate movie making has become so laborious that comedians are kind of kicked out by 50.

I recently found out about this other super movie star. He only works from about 11:00 to 4:00, so all his movies take like 120 days. But this was a lot of stuff to do in 35 days.

I have a theory that if you're famous more years than you're not famous, then you get a little nutty.

There's always been a confusion about my sensibility. 'Is he kind of edgy, or is he Carol Burnett?' I'm a little bit of a hybrid. I like to please, but I like dark stuff, too.

I remember doing a comedy show with Jim Carrey once, and he was out there with his foot behind his neck and rubbing his face with it.

Corporate stand-up allowed me to make my own schedule and make money as if I was in show business.

Now we're here in 2009. My boys are 16 and 18, one's going to USC film school, and the other seems to be a natural comedian. So now I have to go back into show business as a senior comedian. So I hope to get Walter Brennan-type roles, Gabby Hayes kind of stuff, be the old-timer. We'll see what happens.

There was no Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade where I was from. Looking back on it, I was trying to do sketch comedy in my stand-up, which is still kind of what I am doing now. To go full-circle here, it's kind of like one-man sketch.

I think the Brexit vote in Great Britain informing this populist movement of nationalism is kind of a global thing, and I think it's no particular political party's fault. People have been left behind, and in America, we're used to going forward. It's always like we're going to be better; the next generation's going to be better.

If you just kind of live a regular life and make good 'Hollywood' money, you have a certain freedom.

I'm a real people-pleaser.

I did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and '85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.

I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At 'Saturday Night Live,' I stayed almost seven years.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

We didn't even think about it, you know? I used to collect laser discs, and you'd have some college professor analyzing It's a Wonderful Life or Citizen Kane, and now it is pretty funny - the idea of commentary for a silly kid's movie, you know?

I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I'm always in character.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.