“Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort.”

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he’s buying.

Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep.

My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores.

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won’t feel like watching.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.

I must take issue with the term ‘a mere child’, for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Scientists – the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

We don’t fight about music. We don’t fight about artistic direction.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.