"I don't get no respect!" "Its lonely on the top when there's no one on the bottom." "My wife was afraid of the dark, saw me naked, now she's afraid of the light!" "I feel sorry for short people, you know. When it rains, they're the last to know." I'm very lucky. Years ago they had images, like W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Groucho Marx. But today, I think I'm the only one around with an image. And that image is something everyone identified with. They all feel life treated 'em wrong and they got no respect. "My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met." Entered a Los Angeles hospital on August 24, 2004 in preparation for heart valve replacement surgery. Before entering the hospital, he said, "If things go right, I'll be there about a week, and if things don't go right, I'll be there about an hour and a half." In a 1986 interview, he explained the origin of his "respect" trademark: "I had this joke: 'I played hide and seek; they wouldn't even look for me.' To make it work better, you look for something to put in front of it: I was so poor, I was so dumb, so this, so that. I thought, 'Now what fits that joke?' Well, 'No one liked me' was all right. But then I thought, a more profound thing would be, 'I get no respect.'" "I told my doctor that when I woke up in the morning I couldn't stand looking at myself in the mirror. He said, 'At least we know your vision is perfect.'" "To give you an idea how well I was doing at the time I quit [back in 1949], I was the only one who knew I quit." "If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all."