“To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.”

Vice is its own reward.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

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

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

I consider Laura to be one of my best signings, and I am proud to have had such a great singer in my career in the record business. We miss her dearly.

I miss my Dad. My Dad loved cheesy monster movies, so we’d have Godzilla movie marathons. Those are some of my favorite memories, laughing at how the monster outfits were so bad, like black garbage bags for heads.

So that we will miss nothing. Partly it’s greed, but mainly its curiosity. We just want to experience it. And we do.

One of the most powerful sayings I have come across is by Imam ash-Shafi’I, “My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”

We will miss George for his sense of love, his sense of music and his sense of laughter.

He who civilly shows the way to one who has missed it, is as one who has lighted another’s lamp from his own lamp; it none the less gives light to himself when it burns for the other.

I don’t miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

If there is moonlight outside, don’t stay inside! If there is candle inside, don’t stay outside! Moments of romanticism are too valuable to be missed!