Top 30 Dana Carvey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You know, sometimes you can’t just take an armadillo, put it in the barn, light it on fire and expect it to make licorice.”

— Dana Carvey

2. “Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club? Turtle! Turtle!”

— Dana Carvey

3. “If I only ran when nothing hurt, I would never run.”

— Dana Carvey

4. “I’m thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level.”

— Dana Carvey

5. “I always tend to think of all of my shows as possibly my last show. I’m like a junior Springsteen, without the underbite.”

— Dana Carvey

6. “You know ladies and gentlemen, a long time ago, there were lots of people, but that was a long time ago.”

— Dana Carvey

7. “If she were a President, she’d be Babe-raham Lincoln!”

— Dana Carvey

8. “I know it’s a cliche, but the whole family is just whacked. I mean, we’re all out of our minds. They’re the funniest, most eccentric bizarre people I’ve ever met, my siblings.”

— Dana Carvey

9. “I have no regrets. I wanted to raise the kids and be a present father. When I developed a movie, I was gone for a year. That didn’t really work for me. That isn’t fair to make these life-forms and then disappear.”

— Dana Carvey

10. “After years of begging, I got my parents to get me a little Craig tape recorder, a reel to reel. Then I started recording voices, or recording Jonathan Winters off television and stuff like that.”

— Dana Carvey

11. “Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It’s sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn’t the star.”

— Dana Carvey

12. “I have this dream life where I get to be a celebrity but I get to navigate the world fairly easily because I’m always in character.”

— Dana Carvey

13. “I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.”

— Dana Carvey

14. “I think free speech is probably the coolest thing we have in this country, and again, you can label it hate speech and dismiss it, and then you’re allowed to censor it.”

— Dana Carvey

15. “If you just kind of live a regular life and make good ‘Hollywood’ money, you have a certain freedom.”

— Dana Carvey

16. “It’s almost like he’s started to sound even more exotic the more people started doing him. I don’t know why, but there’s just something about Al Gore that makes me laugh.”

— Dana Carvey

17. “You know, Elizabeth Taylor must be in Heaven going, ‘Alright, fire two honey!’”

— Dana Carvey

18. “I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.”

— Dana Carvey

19. “While many comics have a secret persona, I fundamentally want to be myself.”

— Dana Carvey

20. “Please, O ye Lord, keep Jim Bakker behind bars.”

— Dana Carvey

21. “I’m a friend of the CEO of Twitter and he showed me how to be on it, but it causes such an uproar if what you post is perceived in a negative light.”

— Dana Carvey

22. “I’m a real people-pleaser.”

— Dana Carvey

23. “I really enjoy being a dad, and maybe I took it too seriously, but I love being around my kids.”

— Dana Carvey

24. “That’s why modern corporate movie making has become so laborious that comedians are kind of kicked out by 50.”

— Dana Carvey

25. “When people come to see my stand-up, they get a chance to see my characters interact with each other.”

— Dana Carvey

26. “I think ABC sort of hoped I would be really like Carol Burnett. I mean literally, I think.”

— Dana Carvey

27. “I got lucky. I won the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition in 1977 while I was still at San Francisco State.”

— Dana Carvey

28. “I have a theory that if you’re famous more years than you’re not famous, then you get a little nutty.”

— Dana Carvey

29. “I had auditioned for ‘Saturday Night Live’ two or three times before and never really saw myself there. I looked up to Belushi and Bill Murray and Aykroyd and I never saw myself as in their world.”

— Dana Carvey

30. “Well, I loved variety in television, I loved sketch comedy. At ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I stayed almost seven years.”

— Dana Carvey

31. “I did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and ’85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.”

— Dana Carvey

32. “I don’t find biology as interesting as politics and humanism. I talk more about existential stuff.”

— Dana Carvey

33. “I never read the tabloids.”

— Dana Carvey

34. “My characters all start with rhythms and sounds. Once I hear the voice and get into the rhythm, the attitude and the physicality just come out on their own.”

— Dana Carvey