- Ray Bradbury: [on alien life] Simply by arriving, maybe they'll teach us that we're five billion people with a single skin around us. And if they teach us only that, then the encounter will be worth everything.
- Ray Bradbury: If we believe infinity goes on forever, we should want to go on forever with it. We have a - we're very privileged to be alive in the universe; we represent the life force here.
- Don Rickles: How come the moon program is, like, in a downhill...
- Ray Bradbury: There's a failure of imagination, a failure of will - uh, which I don't understand; uh, our president doesn't seem to care about it, uh, which I'm very disappointed in. We need, this, uh, kind of idealism to help us rise above the problems we've had the last twenty years. We've done so many things incorrectly, and when we do a thing right, I should think we'd be celebrating it more.
- Johnny Carson: [describing a potential soap opera] Delores accepts a collect call from an obscene caller, and tells him from now on to phone after 6 and on weekends when the rates go down.
- Johnny Carson: [describing a potential soap opera] Susan is concerned when her 13-year-old daughter is voted Miss Congeniality by a truck drivers' union out of Encino.
- Johnny Carson: [describing a potential soap opera] Eyebrows are raised when Ken checks into a local motel with no luggage and a 20-pound watermelon.
- Johnny Carson: [describing a potential soap opera] Sarah desperately needs money, and offers herself to an old roué for one thousand dollars; she settles for twenty.
- Johnny Carson: [describing a potential soap opera] In the opening episode, several years ago Dr. Yutzman delivered a set of Siamese triplets, and now he faces the delicate task of telling Manny, Moe and Jack that one of them is adopted.
- Cheryl Ladd: [on her diverse fan mail] I got a letter the other day, from a man 52 years old.
- Johnny Carson: Oh!
- Cheryl Ladd: Married. Um...
- Johnny Carson: That's... I'm - I'm 52.
- Cheryl Ladd: Are you?
- Johnny Carson: Yes. And married... So embarrassing, you bringing up my letter, but...
- Johnny Carson: [to Cheryl Ladd] When you said, "I got this letter the other day from a 52-year-old man"... I got the feeling that you thought he was just this side of going to the Motion Picture Country Home.
- Cheryl Ladd: [on learning to shoot for her series] I thought, "Hey - nothin' to it; I watch Starsky and Hutch". And I got in the position, and I pulled the trigger - I heard this blood-curdling scream... and it was me.
- Johnny Carson: [on Rickles marrying at an older age] You waited 'til you were 37 or...
- Don Rickles: Of course. Go through what you did?... "Your honor..."
- Don Rickles: You make a little trouble when you bring up names.
- Johnny Carson: OK.
- Don Rickles: 'Cause I could bring up a couple of things about you, and you'd be in court again.
- Don Rickles: [on visiting Israel] I went with Newhart and, you know, uh, Bob is German-Irish - a good Catholic, the best Catholic in the world.
- Don Rickles: [to Ed] As you are a good Catholic; you trip once in a while, but... Sometimes, when the priest wanted to hit you with the water, he went, "Nah, better not."
- Don Rickles: The Almighty laughs! He has a sense of humor!
- Ed McMahon: He does?
- Don Rickles: Of course! I'm a Jew - I have nothing to fear!
- Don Rickles: [feigns a heart attack]
- Don Rickles: [on the Japanese] I saw one prisoner at the time of the war, and they are now our dear friends. In fact, I love 'em so much, my kid has all their toys.
- Don Rickles: [on married life] They're always in heat when you are not ready! Isn't it the truth? I can see it now - "Hi, pussycat..." And I gotta go by the bed and go, "Meow... meow..."
- Johnny Carson: Are you still playing that ridiculous game?
- Don Rickles: Yeah. One night I was a werewolf, but that got out of hand.
- Ray Bradbury: The very first thing I wrote, when I was 12, was about landing on Mars. So it's kind of wonderful that I've grown up with what started as a huge love and a hobby, and I wind up, uh, doing a play, writing a book - and, uh, next year, here at NBC, by gosh, a 6-hour special mini-series on "The Martian Chronicles".
- Ray Bradbury: If strange creatures, in the last nine years, have landed on the moon - and they have - uh, then the other is possible, creatures coming the other way. If we're moving out into the universe, and we're going to be colonizing the moon in the next few years - we're going to be colonizing Mars.
- Ray Bradbury: There is life on Mars, and it is us! We are - we're gonna be the Martians from here on in. That, to me, is tremendously exciting.
- Johnny Carson: What would happen - as a science fiction writer - if you ever explored the possibility, if they find something else that is faster than the speed of light? Now, they say that's impossible.
- Ray Bradbury: Well, they said breaking the sound barrier was impossible, too.
- Ray Bradbury: [on potential contact with alien life] It'll be like going into St. Peter's on a summer afternoon. That wonderful feeling you have of being in a cathedral like that. Or the ending of "Close Encounters"; what you really have is - is the flesh of God moving one way, right? And our flesh moving this way, and they make contact like the, uh, portrait of Adam and God on the Sistine ceiling, hm? That's a wonderful moment, when the electricity leaps back and forth. And I think we will burst apart with pride at being part of this universal experience. I don't think it will diminish us; it will make us excited, and want to live forever.