Top 50 Billy Crystal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t give up your power.”

— Billy Crystal

2. “Change is such hard work.”

— Billy Crystal

3. “It is better to look good than to feel good.”

— Billy Crystal

4. “I can’t be funny if my feet don’t feel right.”

— Billy Crystal

5. “What’s so fascinating and frustrating and great about life is that you’re constantly starting over, all the time, and I love that.”

— Billy Crystal

6. “In high school, I was the class comedian as opposed to the class clown. The difference is the class clown is the guy who drops his pants at the football game, the class comedian is the guy who talked him into it.”

— Billy Crystal

7. “By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he’s too old to go anywhere.”

— Billy Crystal

8. “Do something special on your birthday. Whatever you do, celebrate the fact that you’re here, and that people love you and you love them. We only do this once.”

— Billy Crystal

9. “I’m a baby. I sleep like a baby – I’m up every two hours. And I think a lot. I worry a lot. I have great nights of no sleep where ideas come.”

— Billy Crystal

10. “My granddaughter’s birth has made me want to create things she will love.”

— Billy Crystal

11. “Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.”

— Billy Crystal

12. “Gentlemen, start your egos.”

— Billy Crystal

13. “Did you ever reach a point in your life, where you say to yourself, ‘This is the best I’m ever going to look, the best I’m ever going to feel, the best I’m ever going to do,’ and it ain’t that great?”

— Billy Crystal

14. “My mind is always going. I’m always thinking what I need to do, what I haven’t done, what I did do, what I didn’t do as well as I could – I’m relentless that way with myself.”

— Billy Crystal

15. “Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.”

— Billy Crystal

16. “It’s money. I remember it from when I was single.”

— Billy Crystal

17. “That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.”

— Billy Crystal

18. “Despite what The Wall Street Journal says, our awards are the best-kept secret in America, with the possible exception of what George W. Bush did in the ’70s.”

— Billy Crystal

19. “Great news! Hosting Oscars counts five hours toward my community service!”

— Billy Crystal

20. “I don’t like heights. This is why I stopped growing at fifth grade.”

— Billy Crystal

21. “The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.”

— Billy Crystal

22. “I quit drinking. That was a big problem for a lot of years. Then after that, I just started feeling grateful again.”

— Billy Crystal

23. “The Passion of the Christ opened up on Ash Wednesday, had a Good Friday.”

— Billy Crystal

24. “You have to really respect what your kids are doing with their kids and how they’re raising them. You can’t push your way into areas where you shouldn’t be saying anything. You have to always remember they’re not your own kids. Play with them, love them, spoil them to death – then hand them back.”

— Billy Crystal

25. “But I say to all of you, as my Mom said to me: Do something special on your birthday. Whatever you do, celebrate the fact that you’re here, and that people love you and you love them.”

— Billy Crystal

26. “I used to limp around my neighborhood imitating him. I did my Bar Mitzvah with an Oklahoma drawl.”

— Billy Crystal

27. “If you do something for the first time, you will always remember it. If your Dad has something to do with it, you write about it.”

— Billy Crystal

28. “At some point I stopped stand-up because I didn’t have something to say on a nightly basis.”

— Billy Crystal

29. “I’m married – I’ve caught my limit.”

— Billy Crystal

30. “As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is.”

— Billy Crystal

31. “I think when I feel I’m at my best is when I’m on stage, and it’s my version of jazz because it’s just riffing or something.”

— Billy Crystal

32. “To be good, you need to believe in what you’re doing.”

— Billy Crystal

33. “When comedy is good, it’s jazz. The beats of it, the looseness, the improvisational part, the music-the way you hit the inflection, the high notes of a joke. It’s all melody to me.”

— Billy Crystal

34. “When you realize you want to invest the rest of your lifestyle with somebody, you want the rest of your life to commence as quickly as achievable.”

— Billy Crystal

35. “My grandparents invented joylessness. They were not fun. I’ve already had more fun with my grandchildren than my grandparents ever had with me.”

— Billy Crystal

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “Good news, they found Nemo! The bad news is, they found him in one of Wolfgang Puck’s puff pastries.”

— Billy Crystal

37. “Dad had a music store, and he’d often bring home comedy albums that I would listen to. I started listening to Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby, and developing taste. They really influenced my style of comedy.”

— Billy Crystal

38. “From the first time I saw Sid Caesar be funny I knew that’s what I had to do.”

— Billy Crystal

39. “The inspiration was this great group of 40 or 50 relatives, sometimes for Thanksgiving or Passover or something and my brothers would just go up and make them laugh.”

— Billy Crystal

40. “I had a dream that Connie Chung is doing a newscast about my death and they show a clip from Soap.”

— Billy Crystal

41. “Bambi, to a kid, was scary.”

— Billy Crystal

42. “Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I’d always go off book and start improvising.”

— Billy Crystal

43. “Well, the way things are going, aside from wheat and auto parts, America’s biggest export is now the Oscar.”

— Billy Crystal

44. “I miss those days, those midnight hours on the turnpike with nothing on the road but trucks and me, and nothing on my mind but the act and how I could make it funnier.”

— Billy Crystal

45. “I didn’t rebel as a child. I missed that angry teenager thing.”

— Billy Crystal

46. “Nobody is more truthful when he’s acting than De Niro.”

— Billy Crystal

47. “A laugh is a weird sound, and when you get a couple thousand people making it at once, it’s really strange. But when I can feel proud of myself for causing it, it’s great.”

— Billy Crystal

48. “We all have a different image of what old is, and if you were exposed to senior citizens at a young age, as I was, it can color your soul with terror.”

— Billy Crystal

49. “You really have to have some muscle to be on the stage in front of the world.”

— Billy Crystal

50. “When I’ve gotten criticism, it’s that it’s too long, too soft, didn’t hit the government hard enough. Then when I do hit the government, they go, What’s he doing hitting the government?”

— Billy Crystal