“America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damned well pleased.”

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren’t present.

If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat – in other words, turn you into an adult.

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.

Southern California is a nice place, if you could cut out the show-business cancer. It just keeps spreading.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

Don’t send funny greeting cards on birthdays or at Christmas. Save them for funerals, when their cheery effect is needed.

The problem in Afghanistan is really not so much land as water. It’s a dry country with ample amounts of water running through it, but not to good enough effect.

The most brilliant satire of all time was ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift. You’ll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

The beauty of democracy is that an average, random, unremarkable citizen can lead it.

Once you’ve built the big machinery of political power, remember you won’t always be the one to run it.

A humorist doesn’t really do that much note-taking.

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

My dad died when I was young; my mom remarried with more haste than sense to a fellow… he wasn’t evil or anything, but he was worthless.

I know what’s good for me. I can’t play black or gray. I can’t be a villain or anything close to one. I have to play white.

But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar.

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

Memory is just as much of an instrument as anything else in music.

What I enjoy doing more than anything is.

Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.