Jerry Seinfeld on Time

"I'm a single guy. I date. I think I enjoy it. For me, nothing caps off a week like four hours of solid tension."

"When I go to see somebody work, I don't want to see your "new hour". I want to see the act!"

"No. Books take a long time, and I don't get to hear the laughs."

"Truthfully, I loved working on every episode , we just had the best time and got along great, and there were a number of years when the show wasn't successful and we still loved it."

"All human endeavor is killing time. All of it."

"Sunday Sitdown" Interview"

"New York Times Interview"

"I remember somebody coming in and pitching me an idea one time, and I'm saying "No. No, I don't think so." And-- and the writer said to me "But we've done this so many times before!" And I went "That is not a point in its favor!"

"I was best man at a wedding one time; that was pretty good. Pretty good title, I thought: "best man". I thought it was a bit much! I thought we'd have the groom and a pretty good man. That's more than enough. If I'm the best man, why is she marrying him?"

"I've probably been working on this for two years. It's a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that's what I do; that's what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time wastefully... so that then, I can then waste their time!"

"I could have easily done for one or two or three more years, but it would have changed the way people look back at it. I think I made the right decision. Because people like the show now even more than they did in the 1990s, because it didn't get worn out."

"I think we should all wear the same exact clothes... because it seems to be what happens eventually, anyway. Any time you see a movie or a TV show where there's people from the future -- or another planet -- they're all wearin' the same outfit. I think the decision just gets made: "Alright, everyone, from now on, it's just gonna be the one-piece silver suit with the V-stripe and the boots. That's the outfit."

"I was happy with the Seinfeld finale because we didn't want to do another episode as much as we wanted to have everybody come back to the show we had so much fun with. It was a way to thank all of the people who worked on the show over the years that we thought made the show work."

"I had glasses when I was 10 years old. Somebody puts something on your face at 10, you leave it there; you don't know the difference! I thought I was getting glasses 'cause I couldn't tell what my parents looked like. 'Cause every time I'd ask my mother to buy me something, she'd say "What do I look like? A bank?"

"The pitch for , the real pitch, when Larry and I went to NBC in 1988, was we want to show how a comedian gets his material. The show about nothing was just a joke in an episode many years later, and Larry and I to this day are surprised that it caught on as a way that people describe the show, because to us it's the opposite of that."

"That was the dominance of network television at that time. There was no competition. was the only game in town. A guy like me-- Could you ima-- I would never have gotten past my second set, today, before they would've grabbed me! Right? "Hey, this guy's pretty good!" "Just grab him! Let's do-- Somebody come up with somethin' for this kid!"

"I'm very good at streamlining a series of activities so that everything gets done in the amount of time that I have. I am very good with the clock. Like if I have a lot of stuff to do and a limited amount of time, I'm very good at figuring it all out. I'm very efficient in everything that i do, I never waste time so that I have more time to waste."

"In my world, the wrong-er somethin' feels, the right-er it is. So, to waste this much time on something this stupid is-- that's-- that felt good to me. It's the exact opposite of what we do here at the Times, which is: we spend appropriate amounts of time on deserving subjects. So, I'm the exact opposite of that: inappropriate and undeserving subjects."

"The first thing I want to do is: I want you to have confidence in me. Well, how am I gonna do that? I'm gonna take the joke that fails the least amount of time, and I'm gonna put that at the front of the set. It's just tech-- it's scientific technique. If the first thing I say gets a laugh: at that moment, 100% of everything I've said gets a laugh! And now, I've got your confidence."

"The time-travel aspect of old cars, to me, is a big part of the fun. I live out in East Hampton, and there's a lot of roads out there where you can't tell what year it is. So, if you get in a '63 -- and that's a '63-- everything on it was made in '63 -- you can kind of go into that little dream, like "Well, gee, if I was-- had this car in that year, this-- it would be just like this!"

"I was in Switzerland one time. Beautiful country! Great country. And interesting: 500 years without a war! Very impressive. Also very lucky for the Swiss Army! I don't know if you've ever seen that little Swiss Army knife? It's not much of a weapon! If somebody attacks you, what do you pull out? Your nail clippers? "C'mon, buddy! Let's go!" "You get past me, the guy in back of me's got a spoon!"

"To me, clothes spend most of their lives waiting, if you look at it. In the closet, in the hamper, in the drawer. The shirts in your house right now are going "He never picks me...". Laundry day is their only exciting day, 'cause the washing machine is the nightclub of clothes. It's dark, bubbles happening; they're all kind of dancing around in there. A shirt grabs the underwear: "C'mon, babe, let's go!"

"was gonna be a 90-minute special that was gonna fill in for Saturday Night Live one weekend-- one Saturday night when they were off. And I just didn't think that you could sustain that for 90 minutes. I thought maybe you could do it for 30 minutes. And that's how it became a TV series. It was gonna be a special all the way, but I just didn't think we could last 90 minutes. So, instead, we ended up makin' 90 hours."

"I have always wanted a Clio. I don't know much about it... but I know it's a good award, because in 1991, they screwed up this whole presentation, and there were a bunch of awards left over, and all of these ad people here climbed up onto the stage and tried to grab them! So, to me, that says: "This means something!" That really happened, and it's my all-time favorite award-show occurrence because it was so honest. People just said "I want a damn Clio", and they went for it."

"The reason I got is: my manager, George Shapiro, wrote a note to Brandon Tartikoff, the President of NBC, and it was one sentence; he said "Call me a crazy guy, but I think some day Jerry Seinfeld's gonna be doing a series on NBC." Now, when he wrote that note, it was... 1988. I had been on The Tonight Show for seven years -- three times a year -- destroying. And George still to say to NBC "I know this sounds crazy...". I thought of this just the other week: "What was so crazy about the idea?"

"When I was starting out, I used to sit down and write a couple times a week. And then, one day, I was watching these construction workers go back to work; I was watchin' 'em kind of trudgin' down the street... and I was just-- It was like a revelation to me, and I realized "These guys don't want to go back to work after lunch, but they're goin... 'cause that's their job!" And I "If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job, I should be able to do the same." "Just trudge your ass in!"

"You start to know, on stage, when to get off. There's just this feeling that you develop from years and years of doing it; you just feel that "We're getting-- Everyone's really having a good time... and I think, in another few minutes, this is going to start to get old... 'Good night, everybody!'" And everyone's happy! It's just... proportions. Y'know? I guess it's a function of art and economy: that economy is essential to all good art. And I thought "Let's-- " Even though we had done a lot : nine years, 180 episodes, I thought "We can't do one too many, or it's gonna taint the whole thing."