Joy Behar Quotes

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

My father and mother - I figured if I could make them laugh, they'd stop fighting. I stole all their material.

By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

Comedians are therapists. People honestly think we're doing it for ourselves. No. If we wanted to do stand-up for ourselves, we would perform in front of a mirror and never go to a club. We are giving this away. Some people are going through so much in their lives, they want to hear something else that's going on in the world and laugh.

Humor is an escape, because you cannot think about your problems when you are trying to be funny; so, in essence, "being a humorist" gives you a valid excuse to hide from your pain.

On Michael Jackson and child stardom: He had one of the worst childhoods ever. I think I had the second.

I think the bottom line is that if you get through a childhood like mine, it's not at all bad. Obviously, you come out a pretty tough turkey, and you have had all the inoculations you need to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is, most of us don't come out.

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

The childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.

Making my family laugh when I was little - it became an addiction. It was a kind of survival.

I used to watch 10 hours of television a night, my entire childhood. And I don't think it did all good things to me. I certainly still have social problems that are a result of being in my room alone too much.

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

Has it ever occurred to you that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

A sense of humor is needed armor.

Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.

One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things--combinations that may yield new formsof expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It's exactly what children's play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children's play is so important a part of childhood--and beyond.

I think evil is our collective shadow. Each one of us has a tendency for the diabolical. If I put you in inhumane conditions, if you're not educated, if you're extremely poor, if you're humiliated, then as a child if you suffer abuse, then you will manifest even when you grow up.

No matter how sophisticated our lives may be we need to think of ourselves as creative children.

I think everyone is given drama, by virtue of the fact that we all have drama in our lives, but not everyone can make people laugh.

What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn't help me at all.