The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories – those that don’t work, those that break down, and those that get lost.
The biographer’s problem is that he never knows enough. The autobiographer’s problem is that he knows too much.
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.
Life is always walking up to us and saying, “Come on in, the living’s fine,” and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
It was dramatic to watch my grandmother decapitate a turkey with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with gourmet status.
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
Life seemed to be an educator’s practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
There’s so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.
It’s good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.
There was scarcely a woman alive, it seemed, who could resist the urge to haul men down onto beds, car seats, kitchen floors, dining-room tables, park grass, parlor sofas, or packing crates, entwine warm thighs around them, and pant in ecstasy.
After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches.