"When I was a kid, you would tune in to 'The Tonight Show' before you went to sleep. Johnny Carson. A big treat. I know it's a privilege of mine to be able to be in people's homes. So I hope I make everyone proud, including my parents, and do a good job in this."

"I'm going to North Pole to help out Santa this year."

"Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me, as a late-night talk show, which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking."

"Thank you... fantasy football draft, for letting me know that even in my fantasies, I am bad at sports."

"Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things."

"I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green."

"At first I was queasy I'll never forget the sound of the scalpel cutting a body open. But it was so cool trying to work out how these people died."

"An idea isn't worth much until a man is found who has the energy and ability to make it work."