In 2008, Milton Sheppard opened the Waiter Training School in the Bronx, N.Y., charging $175 for courses, but the business soon ran out of money. He now operates a clown college in the same space.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

Famous people are deceptive. Deep down, they're just regular people. Like Larry King. We've been friends for forty years. He's one of the few guys I know who's really famous. One minute he's talking to the president on his cell phone, and then the next minute he's saying to me, 'Do you think we ought to give the waiter another dollar?'

With the education I had, all I could do was work as a burro, in whatever I could find: shoeshine boy, janitor, dishwasher, waiter, bartender, cashier, bricklayer, painter.

If I can't eat the meal in a restaurant, and the waiter asks, 'Is everything all right, Madam?', I tell them that I'm on a diet.

For me, good service is efficient and discreet; it's that critical balance. As soon as the client sits down, the communication flow has to start. Customers need to feel that the waiters are supervised - that there's a system in place.

I wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.

With my wife I don't get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to 'the best woman a man ever had.' The waiter joined me.

I was an amazing bartender and a great waiter. I think, in a way, that was my acting school.

Waiting around to be perfect never amounts to anything. Don't be a waiter or you'll be serving other people.

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.

Now if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French based upon movies rumors recent headlines unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

With my wife I don't get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to 'the best woman a man ever had.' The waiter joined me.

To go to the Oscars for Moneyball - that was pretty amazing. And to be able to go work with Kathryn Bigelow - that's going to be pretty sweet. Hopefully I don't have to go back to being a waiter. That's still my main goal.