Gilda Radner Quotes

“Comedy was about what was wrong with the world — people laughed because something was too big, or too small, or too much, or not enough.

Quirks and exaggerations were the essence of parody. Irony and discomfort the grist for humor.”

“Don’t look for perfect endings, but allow not knowing to lead you to a deeper appreciation of life, so that you get your joy back on the way to an outcome that remains to be revealed.”

“Force is the right word to use for Belushi. Everything he did was suicidal — the way he ate, the way he drank, even the way he walked and moved.

He would throw himself up in the air and splash down on the ground. His characters were suicidal. He was the master of kamikaze comedy.

When he died, it didn’t seem so strange. But I knew I didn’t want to be the second one to go.”

“I had been pregnant in the sixties, and at nineteen years old had had an illegal abortion that probably influenced the messy state of my reproductive organs. For the next nineteen years my priority was to finish my education and pursue my career.

Now I couldn’t take my fate: You’ll never have a baby. That was the sentence handed to me. I began to beat my fists against a door that maybe I had locked on the other side.”

“It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, but then we have to die.

What we put into every moment is all we have. You can drug yourself to death or you can smoke yourself to death or eat yourself to death, or you can do everything right and be healthy and then be hit by a car.

Life is so great, such a neat thing, and yet all during it we have to face death, which can make you nuts and depressed. It's such an act of optimism to get up every day and get through a day and enjoy it and laugh and do all that without thinking about death.

What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal – all the pleasures of life, and then death. I think some people just can't take the variables; they just can't take the deal – that is why they drink themselves silly or hide away or become afraid of everything.

Sometimes I feel like I couldn't take the deal – it was just too much. Cancer brought life and death up close.”

“The news never meant anything to us on 'SNL' because we always looked at it just to see how to satirize it. Nothing in our personal lives was sacred. We used all of it for material on the show.

The most important thing was those ninety minutes live on Saturday night. So what if your whole world was falling apart as long as you could find a joke in it and make up a scene.

Millions of Americans saw what we did, and it was a charmed time. We thought we were immortal, at least for five years. But that doesn’t exist anymore. Now real stuff happens.”

“There are no guarantees. There are no promises, but there is you, and strength inside to fight for recovery. And always there is hope.”

“What we put into every moment is all we have.”