“[On being shown an apartment by a real estate agent:] Oh, dear, that’s much too big. All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.”

All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

Writing well is the best revenge.

And if my heart be scarred and burned, The safer, I, for all I learned.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

The only useful thing I ever learned in school was that if you spit on your eraser it erased ink.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.

Ducking for apples — change one letter and it’s the story of my life.

But I don’t give up; I forget why not.

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.

Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.

Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.

A girl’s best friend is her mutter.

After my first year on ‘Gossip Girl,’ everybody said, ‘You’ve got to do a big commercial movie, ride this wave.’

I’m not a big fan of just doing weights. Anything more physical is infinitely better.

Climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big government politician who wants more power. Why? Because it is a theory that can never be disproven.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

It’s nice to know there’s a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I’m not the center of the world – in a good way.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

The truth is few people “think” big and even fewer “play” big. Why? Because “big” often means big responsibilitie s, big hassles and big problems. They look at that “bigness” and shrink. They’re smaller than their problems.

I came home every Friday afternoon, riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.