Cosby Quotes - Page 2

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I use the exercise room early, because I don't want to get on the treadmill and everyone's going 'Oh, Bill Cosby,' and then they come around to see how fast I'm walking, and it becomes very competitive.

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.

'Cosby' opened up so many people's vision to something that they had never seen before or really contemplated before and exposed them to things that were going on that were completely below their radar.

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

Camille Hanks, whose upper-middle-class parents both had college degrees, was a student at the University of Maryland planning on a teaching career when she met Bill Cosby, who was seven years her senior.

I really understood a lot more about comedy after listening to Bill Hicks, who died at 32 years old. He's probably the best comedian who ever lived. Although you can't say that because of Carlin, Cosby and Pryor.

I was fresh out of drama school and had no idea what I was doing. They hustled me along and Bill Cosby tolerated my rookie behavior. It was great. Once you have 'The Cosby Show' on your resume, you can keep going.

Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.

It was the Cosby issue that made me realize how much I really cared about women's issues and how much I realize it's important for me to be an advocate for issues that aren't necessarily my own, to be an ally for issues.

I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.

There was the 'Cosby Show' in America in the 1980s, which was a doctor in a beautiful Brownstone middle-class house. We just haven't created a role like that in the U.K.; it's always gangs and crime. We need to be brave.

'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.

Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.

Every impression that I do is just a terrible variation on an awful Bill Cosby impression. You're doing an Australian accent, but it's just Australian Bill Cosby; or that's just British Bill Cosby; that's Pirate Bill Cosby.

One reason that we have collectively plugged our ears against a decade of dismal revelations about Bill Cosby is that he made lots of Americans feel good about two things we rarely have reason to feel good about: race and gender.

I set out to tell my story, which is based on my family. Dr. Cosby told his story in 'The Cosby Show.' The comparisons stop there in terms of my creation of the show. We just both happen to have black fathers at the center of it.

What makes me laugh is hearing the stuff about my son or the stuff about my mom. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy; they talked a lot about their moms and their kids. Those are the things that inspired me to do stand-up.

I want people to say at the end of my day, you know, like I used to say about Sidney Poitier and James Cagney and Joan Crawford and Red Skelton and those guys and Bill Cosby. They did quality and substance. You always remember them.

When I was born, that was right smack in the middle of 'The Cosby Show.' But what I remember is my mother took me with her... She exposed me to the world in such a way where I was included. And I didn't feel like she chose her career over me.

When it comes to English stand-up comedy, Indians have only seen the best - Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby and the like. So, when someone claims to be an English stand-up comedian in India, he'd better be very good if he's going to make a life of it.

You can't erase Bill Cosby's contributions. That's the conflict. He's one of the most influential comedians of all time, and 'The Cosby Show' is one of the most influential sitcoms ever. When I watched as a kid, I wanted Cliff to be my dad. Everybody did.

The Bill Cosby I know has been great to me and great for a lot of people. What he's done for comedy and television has been legendary and history-making. What he's done for the black community and education has been invaluable. That's the Bill Cosby I know.

If Judge Steven T. O'Neill sent Mr. Cosby away for the rest of his life, that sentence couldn't undo what he's convicted of having done to Andrea Constand, his accuser in two trials. It also can't undo what he once did for me, which was to make me believe in myself.

I think one of the greatest advantages we had on the show growing up was being exposed to Mr. Cosby - being exposed to his work ethic, being exposed to how he handles the job of celebrity and living in the public eye... I think that all had a real significant impact.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

I think Mr. Cosby has always been very much an activist and a big proponent of African-American pride. That's how 'The Cosby Show' came about. I think in his older years, he has gotten a lot more direct and vocal about it. But I think he only wants the best for all of us.

It was the Cosby family on the cover, but overlaid on that, it appeared to be a shattered glass. So it really wasn't just about the shattering of the Huxtables: it was really a shattering of the black family. And it was a question about that and where do we stand on that.

In 1965, Cosby had become the first black man ever to star in a prime-time television show; he was conscious enough of his non-dissolved, traditional nuclear family that he made it the foundation of his public persona, his comedy act, and eventually of his blockbuster sitcom.

For every R. Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there's, you know, the owner of the grocery store, the coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who are doing the same things. But we don't pay attention until it's a big name. And we don't pay attention 'til it's a big celebrity.

I've always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby - more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics - Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle - you get to see them a bunch, and you go, 'Wow, this is where I need to be.'

I worked with so many comedians who became big names - so many, I can't even remember some of their names. John Byner, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers. Shecky Green at the MGM. When I started my career, my first hotel in Las Vegas was at the old Flamingo. My opening act was Bill Cosby.

Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.

When 'The Cosby Show' came out, and everyone was up in arms about 'The Cosby Show' and that it was reflecting a world that didn't exist - but I knew black doctors. And I knew black lawyers. And I knew families that, you know, had a mother and a father and kids that were well-behaved.

When we've had images that perpetuate the negative stereotype of people of color, we've always had 'The Cosby Show' to hold up against that. And the fact that we no longer have that kinda leaves us not in a great place in terms of having the wide scope of the images of people of color.

If I had the gift of Jerry Seinfeld, of Bill Cosby, of Lewis Black, these instinctively brilliant comic minds, then you go that route! But you gotta know your limitations. I'm more of an actor, more of a process guy. I did Tom Snyder, just as Danny Aykroyd did on 'SNL.' I did it in the club.

At the end of Season 1 of 'Cheers', it was the lowest rated show in all of network television... So we turn to 'Bill Cosby'; when he came to Thursday night, he just exploded. And once the audience was there, we said, 'Hey, by the way, we also have this other great show. It's called 'Cheers'.'

Eddie Murphy did '48 Hrs.' because that was the only movie offered to him. And he killed it. Bill Cosby did 'I Spy' because that was the TV show he was offered. But now, there are networks dedicated to comedy, and the Internet... it's so easy for comedians to not do things that aren't true to them.

Some call-in moderators are neutral and courteous. Then there's Rush Limbaugh, who is funny and pompous and a scapegoater and hatemonger. His popularity could cause you to draw some terrible conclusions about the state of mind of the American people. It helps to remember that Bill Cosby is popular, too.

I liked comedy as a kid. When I was a kid, I'd go to sleep to, like, Bill Cosby albums every night. I'd listen to 'Bill Cosby Is A Very Funny Fellow... Right!' and 'Wonderfulness,' which are two of his most famous albums. Then the next night, I'd flip them over, 'cause it was the old stackable turntable.

I was in love with a lot of people, because I was a student of the game of comedy - Carol Burnett, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Don Rickles, Red Foxx, Moms Mabley - who gets no credit, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Kirby. I loved them all, and I used to just take a page out of all of them.

My bedtime was 8 P.M. But on 'Cosby' nights, I got to stay up until 8:30. Real big deal. This is when they could afford to do a completely different title sequence in TV every year. I always looked forward to that. It was like a mini musical at the top of the show. My favorite was the Top Hat fancy version.

'The Cosby Show' changed America's opinion on so many different topics and opened so many people's eyes, and so you really learned immediately the power of what you were doing, that there was a power in portraying a role, and you were made aware of the effect that it could have on people, so it does raise the bar.

I had done a couple of plays, but I was a clueless boob. 'Cosby' allowed me to have something on my resume that was real and then the producers of 'Guiding Light' let me play a preppy killer just the following month. Suddenly I had two gigs on my resume that made me look like a real actor, although I was far from it.

With the stand-up comic on TV, whether it's Seinfeld or Cosby or Roseanne, more important than their knowledge of how to tell a joke is their knowledge of themselves, or the persona they've created as themselves. So that when you're in a room with writers, you can say, 'Guys, that's a funny line, but I wouldn't say it.'

I want to affect culture. I want to have my mark on everything. I give examples of people like Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones - those are the people who I look up to. The game wouldn't be the same without them. What happens in the course of 5 years isn't really important to me. I care about what they'll say about me in 50 years.

I don't necessarily believe that 'The Cosby Show' should disappear as a cultural reference, but it is. That's sad to me. I understand why. He was a man who possibly did some really bad things, and he should be punished beyond a doubt. But that show, and the impact it had not just on black culture, but culture, was amazing.

'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s, he made the black American family seem 'just like us.'

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