Can we talk? The quotable Joan Rivers, through the years

Gems out of the mouthy mouth of comedian Joan Rivers, who died Thursday at 81, from The Kansas City Star’s files:

1966: “I love being on (Johnny Carson’s ‘Tonight’) show. … I just did Omaha, and some guy gave me all these steaks for Johnny and I was supposed to keep them all for him. You know, dozens of steaks so Johnny could mention so-and-so’s steakhouse or whatever it was. Wouldn’t you think that guy would have given me one steak? Or maybe even a lamb chop?”

1969: “Five years ago, I was writing for Zsa Zsa Gabor and Phyllis Diller and Bob Newhart. I wrote some sketches for Topo, the mouse for the (Ed) Sullivan show. I was an idea girl for ‘Candid Camera.’ Then I decided to write for myself and I was starving in Greenwich Village. Until I did one shot on the Carson show. That did it.”

1972: “Everybody’s moving out here (to Los Angeles). Look at Johnny Carson. (Husband) Edgar (Rosenberg) says I’ll love it, and I probably will. Edgar’s the smartest man I ever met in my life. I yell but he’s always right.

“He’s a great, lovely Englishman. We met when he hired me to write a movie script, and that was it. We wrote a script … for life. We were married four days later and we’ve now been married, happily, happily, seven years.”

1978: “The last time I made a major appearance on TV was four years ago, when I guested on ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ and then realized that in those seven minutes I had given away material it had taken me months to write, and all I had accomplished, perhaps, was giving people a chance to say, ‘Wasn’t that a good ‘Carol Burnett Show’? It didn’t make sense.”

1983: “I’m a feminist in the sense that my whole life I never thought about anything. I wanted to go out and do something and I did it. I came from a family that never thought about it. If I’d told my parents I wanted to be Albert Einstein, they would have said, ‘Fine, terrific.’ But I don’t help women because they’re women, I help whoever’s good. If you’re good, you’re good, and deserve to get ahead.”

1984: “In my heart I’ve always been nice to people, and so has my husband. … I take a lot of credit (for Elizabeth Taylor, a frequent Rivers target, losing weight). And do you know something? She sent Edgar flowers in the hospital (when he’d undergone heart surgery). Isn’t that classy?”

2000: “At this age, truly, what are they going to do to me? They’ve done it all. What, they’re going to take away a TV show? They’ve done it twice. What, they’re going to say she’s unemployable? They’ve done it three times. So (forget) them. I’m going to say what I really think.”

This story was originally published September 4, 2014 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Can we talk? The quotable Joan Rivers, through the years."