“Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.”

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.

What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.

I’ve never not been famous.

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically – for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist – but then what isn’t?

In England, nobody’s your friend.

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke:

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don’t understand computers.

They’re wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

Computers are like horses; they can sense fear and will act based on that.

Comic books aren’t nerdy. You’d have to be an idiot to think computers are nerdy.

I don’t know anything about computers.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one’s mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.