Northwestern's alumni list is truly impressive. This university has graduated best-selling authors, Olympians, presidential candidates, Grammy winners, Peabody winners, Emmy winners, and that's just me!
— Stephen Colbert
I'm not here to affect you politically or socially. I'm here to make you laugh. I use the news as the palette for my jokes.
I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.
We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.
I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.
I'm a huge news junkie. I love what the news does.
Isn't an agnostic just an atheist without balls?
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
Shamelessness is a wonderful part of the character.
If I had free time to go to Los Angeles to shoot a movie, I would rather spend it with my kids.
I'm an actor. I hate to blow everyone's illusions.
I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising.
All I can do is today and tomorrow and have some idea of what we're doing next week. That's all I can worry about.
My mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.
The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.
There's nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends who are going to hell.
You shouldn't listen to us at all if you're looking for information. We don't take ourselves seriously on any level; we're just comedians.
In order to be a top-tier candidate, I need 7.5 million dollars, and I currently have 0.0 million dollars.
In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'
I've been accused of being unambitious, but what I do takes up every minute. I'm executive producer, I'm a writer and the host.
I deliver my Truth hot and hard.
I used to make up stuff in my bio all the time, that I used to be a professional ice-skater and stuff like that. I found it so inspirational. Why not make myself cooler than I am?
The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you.
Status is always ripe for satire, status is always good for comedy.
My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs.
I just think Rosa Parks was overrated. Last time I checked, she got famous for breaking the law.
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
I don't like books, they're all fact, no heart.
I can't prove it, but I can say it.
