I don’t think there would be many jokes, if there weren’t constant frustration and fear and so forth. It’s a response to bad troubles like crime.
I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.
It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.
It is almost always a mistake to mention Abraham Lincoln. He always steals the show.
It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better.
I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.
People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.
People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.
Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.
That’s what my books are, now that I’m a grownup – mosaics of jokes.
War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.
The system promotes to the top those who don’t care about the planet.
The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.
The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.
The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do – put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!