“In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.”

No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.

There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. … A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Emerson’s fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.