Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.
Reality is the only obstacle to happiness.
Humans treat time as a map and always know where they are located on it and respond with the appropriate emotion.
Every day and in every way, baseball gets fancier. A few more years and they’ll be playing on oriental rugs.
Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.
Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
Baltimore is permissiveness. The pleasures of the flesh, the table, the bottle, and the purse are tolerated with a civilized understanding.
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Skinny women don’t enjoy being told they’re skinny nowadays. They enjoy telling you how they got that way, as though starvation were an achievement.
It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
A $10 million windfall? At today’s prices, I’d feel almost as rich as I did one day in 1936 when I found a dime on the sidewalk and blew the whole wad on 20 Mary Jane candy bars, a box of jujubes, and a double feature.
The people who say: ‘You are what you eat’ have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don’t think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.
Sending grown-ups up the wall is one of the things adolescence is all about. A few years ago it was done with rock ‘n’ roll music. Now at least they can do it quietly with a home computer.
Etiquette is the grease that makes it possible for all of us to rub together without unnecessary overheating.
I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families – sometimes into no family at all. When you’re the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.
Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.
The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
You can’t enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
I’ve had an unhappy life, thank God.