“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The only proof he needed for existence of god was music.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Science is magic that works.

If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

I find very often that very ugly women have really handsome men and vice versa because they don’t have any competition. Sometimes handsome men have avoided me.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.

There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.

It’s funny about men and women. Men pay in cash to get them and pay in cash to get rid of them. Women pay emotionally coming and going. Neither has it easy.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.

The club isn’t the best place to find a lover so the bar is where I go.

It’s funny how we say a person ‘made’ us when they actually broke us. Sort of like how I say ‘funny’ – but I actually mean sad.