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The only thing that I would say to anyone doing late night shows is - it took me a couple years then - but when you leave the studio, it's over. That's what you really have to do. After a long time, I would be like, "Maybe I shouldn't have said this," or "Maybe I shouldn't have shown this." But eventually, I got to, "Ah, f - k it." That's what it was that night, tomorrow's the next night.
Sep 17, 2025
What we do have is nothin' but time. Welcome to the Shawshank Redemption of late night!
The world, I think, has too many late-night talk shows.
About a year after I moved to Los Angeles, I decided I wanted to be a joke writer for a late night talk show. So I met with a late night joke writer and he told me that I should start by doing stand-up comedy, because that would really hone my sense of humor and joke writing ability. Eventually I took a stand-up class and a few months later I had a seven-minute act.
I don't do sketch anymore and sometimes I miss it. But I think what I really miss is that time in my life, it was kind of like college. No kids, no real responsibilities, just comedy, food and late nights.
I suppose I will go on selling newspapers until at last will come the late night final.
I'm a late-night guy.
There is no late-night comedy. You watch comedy, you watch whenever you want to tune on. You can it in the middle of the night. You can it in the morning. It's all comedy. They just label it late-night comedy so they don't have to pay as much.
I'm on the Internet a lot more than I watch TV and most everybody I know is, and yet if you watch most late-night talk shows, it's as if it doesn't even exist.
Don't ever rope me in as a late-night talk show host. I don't want to be one.
I do a show. It comes on late at night on TV. And if that means I'm a late-night talk show host, then I guess I am, but in every other regard I resign my commission, I don't care for it.
Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.
Mayor de Blasio wants to eliminate garbage. He believes New York City produces way too much garbage. Well, heck, forget about producing too much garbage. What about late-night talk shows?
In the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame. Followed by fifteen minutes of legal problems, fifteen minutes of ridicule from late-night TV hosts, fifteen minutes of obscurity, and fifteen minutes of "Where are they now?".
He liked cheap women, fast cars, late nights, and hard liquor, especially all together. In Jack's view, you are obliged to sin on Saturday night so you'd have something to atone for Sunday morning. Otherwise, you'd be putting the preacher out of business.
My brain does like the idea of hosting a late-night show. My brain does like the idea of maybe having a show about me. So, I often pitch ideas and work on scripts and do that just because I may not be right about how I feel, so why not just do this, and if it happens and I got my own show, well maybe I would really end up falling in love with it.
You listen to any monologue on late-night TV or just in general, to people talking, and there's always a joke at someone's expense. It's sarcasm; it's nasty. Kids grow up hearing that, and they think that's what humor is, and they think it's OK. But that negativity permeates the entire planet.
I've certainly never taken the care of myself that I should have. On the contrary. I've done a lot of late nights without enough sleep and all that. But I've had fun. Whatever wrinkles are there, I've enjoyed getting them.
I found that to build mental toughness, you need to inconvenience yourself. The early morning runs, if you hate early mornings. The late night runs, if you hate late nights. The snowy cold, the worst conditions you can get, put yourself in those and really make it inconvenient and you start to get a genuine expectation of winning for the price you have to pay.
So many groups fail because they spend all their time in the clubs. Work pours in and they can't handle it because of late-night drinking.
I feel my shows are like a late-night talk show that we settle down and do every night.
David Letterman is the best late-night talk show host right now, hands down, and has been since he first took the desk.
You know, I always was an early morning or late night writer. Early morning was my favorite; late night was because you had a deadline. And at four in the morning you make up some of your most absurd jokes.
I feel like fashion was much more exclusive. There weren't as many parties. There weren't as many social gatherings. It wasn't required that designers have events to lure customers or editors or any of that - it was about a show. If there was a dinner or a party, people would go out after. New York nightlife was about late nights and dancing.
You know it's funny that none of the regular late-night shows now use guest hosts the way Johnny did. No one talks about it much, but it's curious that they don't do it. They would each have to be asked the reason why they don't.
When you're doing late night you're on the grind every night; you send someone to check on your mom.
I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I'm in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I'm Clyde. That's when everything is just settled. In the daytime it's chaotic. Everybody just goin' nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.
Any eyes on me - a late-night street sweeper, some dude texting in his parked car, the homeless guy talking to himself - make me feel uncomfortable when I skate. Everyone expects me to do certain things.
Something peculiar has happened. As I write, none of the Republican candidates for Senate has become a public embarrassment. On the contrary: For the first time in a decade, it is the Democratic candidates, not the Republican ones, who are fodder for late-night comics. That the Democrats are committing gaffes and causing scandals at a higher rate than Republicans not only may be decisive in the battle for the Senate. It could signal a change in our politics at large.
By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry.
There was a product on late night TV that you could attach to your garden hose - "You can water your hard-to-reach plants with this." Who would make their plants hard to reach? That seems so very mean. I know you need water, but I'm going to make you hard to reach. "Think like a cactus!"
There's nothing terribly wrong with The November Man in a serviceable late-night cable TV sort of way but neither is there anything terribly right about it. It's unnecessary and derivative.
Limit or eliminate late-night computer and television viewing. A computer or TV screen may seem much dimmer than a light bulb, but these screens often fill your field of vision, mimicking the effects of a room filled with light.
Sure, losing an election hurts, but I've experienced worse. And at an age when every day is precious, brooding over what might have been is self-defeating. In conceding the 1996 election, I remarked that "tomorrow will be the first time in my life I don't have anything to do." I was wrong. Seventy-two hours after conceding the election, I was swapping wisecracks with David Letterman on his late-night show.
One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."
People made a big deal out of the fact this is the first time a sitting president has done a late-night show. We tried to have other presidents on, but President Bush went to bed every night at 9:00. And President Clinton always seemed to have other late-night plans.
I actually think some of my best moments in life have been while I was with people from Instagram - whether it's super late nights getting a release out or being able to travel to places I'd never visited and meeting some of the most interesting people I've ever met.
I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years.
I’m not good-looking. I used to be, but not anymore. Not like Robert Taylor. What I have got is I have character in my face. It’s taken an awful lot of late nights and drinking to put it there. When I go to work in a picture, I say, ‘Don’t take the lines out of my face. Leave them there.’
A lot of late nights in the gym, a lot of early mornings, especially when your friends are going out, you're going to the gym, those are the sacrifices that you have to make if you want to be an NBA basketball player.
Be there for your children. Sit on the bed and enjoy the late-night talks—try to stay awake! Pray for the Lord to inspire you. Forgive often. Choose your battles. Testify frequently of Jesus Christ and His goodness and of the Restoration. And most of all, let them know of your trust in the Lord.
With Late Night Show I can begin the search for the real Stephen Colbert.I just hope I don't find him on Ashley Madison.
Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that - or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation - is worth it to me. [It is] impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.
The way I approach stardom and the show, I'm like a politician. I'm an elected late-night official to do your work.
One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country.
Once when I was cooking I burned my arm with scalding water. I went to the Emergency Room of the Hospital. When the doctor came in he looked at me and looked at my chart, and looked at me and looked at my chart, then looked at me again and said, "I loved your show!" He told me that when he was doing his internship he would come home every night stressed out, but he would watch a late night rerun of the Andy Griffith Show and relax and fall asleep. He said, "I wouldn't be a doctor, if it wasn't for the Andy Griffith Show".
Politics is pop. Our job as comedians - especially me, as a late-night talk show, which is a broader audience - is to amplify what we think America is thinking.
[Late-night host] is not really a job for a woman. You can't have kids and be a late-night host.I mean Samantha Bee has children, but you're there all day and all night. No one has a life outside of it. I would never try to have a family. I care much more about a career anyway, than having a family, so that's my own prerogative. It's just not something that a woman.
People don't get that being a musician is a job, they don't get what the work takes. And that's just because you're living a dream, so everyone who's observing it from the outside can't really empathize with how much work it is because you're fortunate. And it's a kind of competition with yourself to stay away from all of the excess, whether it's booze or drugs or just the late nights with the addiction to watching the sun rise in some weird part of the world. But when you meet the other musicians, there's generally a spiritual exhaustion that you connect with.
If we are now holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen, I'm out. I'm gone.