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You become successful, the way I see it, only if you're good enough to deliver what the public enjoys. If you're not, you won't have any audience so the performer really has more to do with his success than the public does.

Johnny Carson

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Johnny Carson
Age: 79 †
Born: 1925
Born: October 23
Died: 2005
Died: January 23
Actor
Host
Journalist
Magician
Military Officer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Presenter
Writer
Corning
Iowa
John William Carson
Carson
The Great Carsoni
Enjoy
Enjoys
Become
Performer
Doe
Deliver
Enough
Performers
Really
Public
Way
Successful
Good
Audience
Success

More quotes by Johnny Carson

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Do you know my dream? I really want to become an aluminum-siding salesman.
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Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.
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I have an ego like anybody else, but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.
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Maybe we should hold the next [Olympic] games in Afghanistan and hope the Soviets pull out of that one too.
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We resort, frankly, to pies, which is a comedy staple that's gone back, I guess, to since the first pie was ever baked.
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I don't think it's you that changes with success - it's the people around you who change. Because of your new status, they change in relation to you.
Johnny Carson
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I think students ought to have the right to protest, but not to the point of anarchy.
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There are very few Japanese Jews. As a result, there is no Japanese word for Alan King.
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Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.
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Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president.
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A two-pound turkey and a fifty-pound cranberry-that's Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.
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I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales.
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There's only one critic whose opinion I really value, in the final analysis: Johnny Carson. I have never needed any entourage standing around bolstering my ego. I'm secure. I know exactly who and what I am. I don't need to be told. I make no apologies for being the way I am.
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The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.
Johnny Carson
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Democracy means free television, not good television, but free.
Johnny Carson
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For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson
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If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
Johnny Carson
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George Burns has been on my show twenty or thirty times, or maybe more. How can you turn down a guy that age?
Johnny Carson
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Never marry a girl named 'Marie' who used to be known as 'Murray'.
Johnny Carson
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How much of the national news that you report to the public each night consists of information you've actually gone out and dug up on your own?
Johnny Carson