Top 70 Richard Pryor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Marriage is really tough because you have to deal with feelings... and lawyers.”

— Richard Pryor

2. “Who you gonna believe-me or your lying eyes?”

— Richard Pryor

3. “I’m not addicted to cocaine. I just like the way it smells.”

— Richard Pryor

4. “I believe the ability to think is blessed. If you can think about a situation, you can deal with it. The big struggle is to keep your head clear enough to think.”

— Richard Pryor

5. “When you’re running down the street on fire, people get out of your way!”

— Richard Pryor

6. “All humor is rooted in pain.”

— Richard Pryor

7. “There’s nothing worse than being an aging young person.”

— Richard Pryor

8. “I just don’t want to die alone, that’s all. That’s not too much to ask for, is it It would be nice to have someone care about me, for who I am, not about my wallet.”

— Richard Pryor

9. “A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth.”

— Richard Pryor

10. “Have you ever noticed how quiet you get when you go in the woods? It’s almost like you know that God’s there.”

— Richard Pryor

11. “Two things people throughout history have had in common are hatred and humour. I am proud that I have been able to use humour to lessen people’s hatred.”

— Richard Pryor

12. “When you ain’t got no money, you gotta get an attitude.”

— Richard Pryor

13. “Yes, I’m religious. God has shown me things, made certain ways clear to me.”

— Richard Pryor

14. “Everyone carries around his own monsters.”

— Richard Pryor

15. “Now they’re calling taking drugs an epidemic – that’s cos white folks are doing it.”

— Richard Pryor

16. “I ain’t no movie star, man. I’m a booty star.”

— Richard Pryor

17. “Hawaii is the best form of comfort for me. When I die, I want to be cremated, and I want half my ashes spread in the Pacific around the island, the rest on the property.”

— Richard Pryor

18. “If I ain’t horny, I check to see if my heart’s beatin’.”

— Richard Pryor

19. “I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.”

— Richard Pryor

20. “You work your butt off and somebody says you can’t have your record played because it offends them. Tyrants are made of such stuff.”

— Richard Pryor

21. “That’s insanity. We must be good all the time.”

— Richard Pryor

22. “It’s been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.”

— Richard Pryor

23. “I had to stop drinkin, cuz I got tired of waking up in my car driving ninety.”

— Richard Pryor

24. “I went through every phone book in Africa, and I didn’t find one god damned Pryor!”

— Richard Pryor

25. “What I am for is justice for everyone, just like it says in the Constitution.”

— Richard Pryor

26. “I live in racist America and I’m uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can’t do much better than that.”

— Richard Pryor

27. “I don’t want to go through life as a Wonder Wheel murderer!”

— Richard Pryor

28. “He’s just always positive. He’s always smiling and he’s always trying.”

— Richard Pryor

29. “I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now; relaxed! Cause when I heard the police car I knew they weren’t coming after me!”

— Richard Pryor

30. “But for the use of physical punishment by, and fear of their oppressors, animals would never be a part of a circus.”

— Richard Pryor

31. “I realized this is what God has dealt me, and I should be thankful considering all that’s happened to me in my life, but MS caused the movies to stop – stop dead – and I miss it.”

— Richard Pryor

32. “Friends take up time, and I didn’t have time.”

— Richard Pryor

33. “What I’m saying might be profane, but it’s also profound.”

— Richard Pryor

34. “The MS really started going downhill in 1990.”

— Richard Pryor

35. “If I thought about it, I could be bitter, but I don’t feel like being bitter. Being bitter makes you immobile, and there’s too much that I still want to do.”

— Richard Pryor

36. “My grandmother used to discipline me, I mean, beat my ass, and I deserved them, too.”

— Richard Pryor

37. “If you want a friend, you don’t buy a friend, Eric, you earn a friend through love and trust and respect.”

— Richard Pryor

38. “There’s a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.”

— Richard Pryor

39. “There was a time in my life when I thought I had everything – millions of dollars, mansions, cars, nice clothes, beautiful women, and every other materialistic thing you can imagine. Now I struggle for peace.”

— Richard Pryor

40. “I believe in the institution of marriage, and I intend to keep trying till I get it right.”

— Richard Pryor

41. “Most people that you talk to, they’s intelligent. Like I said, “Most people.””

— Richard Pryor

42. “I’m slower and some days are better than others, but I’m a fighter.”

— Richard Pryor

43. “You can have a film and have 200 white people working on it, and nobody finds anything wrong with that. But if you insist on having a black crew, all of a sudden there’s something wrong.”

— Richard Pryor

44. “I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work, taking any jobs I could get.”

— Richard Pryor

45. “Booty is just a ghetto expression, and I’m just a booty star.”

— Richard Pryor

46. “It’s so much easier for me to talk about my life in front of two thousand people than it is one-to-one. I’m a real defensive person, because if you were sensitive in my neighborhood you were something to eat.”

— Richard Pryor

47. “Movies are movies, and I don’t think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense.”

— Richard Pryor

48. “I bought my parents a home before they died, and they got to see that I was going to be all right. They always thought I would go someplace.”

— Richard Pryor

49. “I became a performer because it was what I enjoyed doing.”

— Richard Pryor

50. “The way I see it, the earth is going to be here after we’re dead and gone. Even if it’s a polluted planet, and they messed it up. Where do they go from here – to another planet so they can mess that up too?”

— Richard Pryor