Whoever coined the phrase "sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me" never met George Carlin. Throughout his 40-plus years as a standup comic, the legendary humorist has utilized words as weapons. Carlin, 68, has quite an arsenal of verbal bombs. Unlike many of his peers who are mere nostalgia acts, Carlin continues to crank out a considerable amount of fresh material. Carlin won raves for his latest HBO special, Life Is Worth Losing, which aired a year ago, and the social engineer hopes to take his musings to Broadway. — Ed Condran

I never read about you hanging around with other celebrities. Are you friends with famous peers or are you the only star in your universe?

I've never had show business friendships. I've had acquaintances. That's fun and nice. I've never really hung out with show business people. I've gone to a business meal occasionally. I don't have a big circle of friends.

Is that by design?

Yes. That's the way I like to be. I live in my head. Think what happens in the non-show biz world with relationships and entanglements. You know what's nice? I love saying to people, "We don't go to people's houses for nothing and we don't have anybody over here." I love the tone of that. If you don't need all that diversion, if you have a satisfactory thing going on inside your head that keeps you entertained, satisfied and challenged, you don't need lots of other people. You don't need to talk to some punk you don't really care about just because he lives down the block. If I choose him that's different. If he chooses me and we're buddies, that's a different deal.

You come from a small family and you didn't opt for many children.

I got very lucky with family. Because of circumstances, I had only my mother. No father present in the home. I had no grandparents who were alive. I had aunts and uncles who were barren and childless. They were very colorful, but I didn't have any bothersome cousins. And I only had one sibling, my brother, who is my best buddy and only one offspring. Keep it simple, save money on greeting cards.

What projects are you working on?

I got big stuff. I could do a number of things. Down the line I would like to do a Broadway show. I could do a one-man Broadway show. I always do a one-man show anyway. Today you have to do big things. It has to be an event. The big words today are event and experience. It's the ESPN experience. We can't even have a sale anymore. It has to be a savings event. We're having the Dodge sales event.

You have a diehard group of fans. But you play casinos often and much of that audience is made up of those with comps or those who see you by the process of elimination. How do you deal with an audience that may not really know what you're about?

I realize at those shows some of the people there might just have used a coupon to see me and know just a little bit about me. Sometimes I have to give them a remedial speech. I tell them that I don't care if you don't know me. You don't figure into my equation. The fact is that you're here for me. I'm here for me. Nobody is here for you. Then they laugh really hard.

You're one of the few people I've ever heard say the word coupon correctly. Not bad for a ninth-grade dropout. Who instilled you with such a love of language?

My mother. She used to say coupon correctly. She used to say "different from not different than" and "compared with not compared to."

Is it true that your mother considered aborting you?

Yes. She had at least one abortion we knew about. This is part of the Broadway show I would like to do called New York Boy. She was sitting in the abortion office with my father; he was reading the sports section according to her. Her mother had died six months previously. While she was sitting in there waiting to get this open and scrape procedure, she was looking at a painting on the wall and she thought she saw her mother in it. She took that as a sign not to have the abortion. I was 50 feet from the drainpipe. That's the opening of the Broadway show: "I thought I would never get here." My mother and father were separated when I was conceived. They ran into each other and impulsively decided to go to Rockaway Beach and I was conceived.

You're pretty intense onstage. What keeps you from losing it up there?

I don't give a crap. I'm way out past the orbit of Pluto in my mind. It's all a distant event. It's a drop in time. You know that none of this matters at all.