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Almost as soon as it aired, 'Late Night' became one of the most buzzed-about shows on television.

The truth is, we have this idea that late night is about creativity and being cool, but that's not our job. Our job is to get as many people watching the commercials in between our show. That's the reality of it.

In my whole career, in fact, I can remember only two first nights when a show was at its peak on the first night. And I just wish we could devise a system where critics came not on a single evening but were given a choice of performances to attend.

If I have one criticism of the other late-night shows, it's that they're almost entirely scripted.

There's a fraudulent root element of comedy in that we say things night after night as though they are rolling effortlessly from the brain and off the tongue, when in fact they are crafted over weeks and months and years.

The next step for me is not 'The Tonight Show.' That's a job for Jimmy Fallon. I'm way too divisive for a show like that.

When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.

Late night television is ready for someone like me... standards have gone to an all-time low.

When you go to a show on opening night, or even the second performance, it is at the very beginning of what it will become. By the end of this run, the show will actually be what it is intended to be.

We thought we were going to go up against SNL on Saturday Nights - that would have changed things so much that it's almost impossible to speculate what might have happened.