“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”

A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.

As we all know from witnessing the consuming jealousy of husbands who are never faithful, people do not confine themselves to the emotions to which they are entitled.

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it’s vastly overrated, it’s frequently unnecessary, and it’s messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Teen pregnancy went way down in the ’90s, and 75 percent of it was because of increased use of contraception.

It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.

Most people zero in on their failures. I try to keep all my attention on a pyramid type philosophy rather than the averaging-down philosophy.

A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes.

Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles.

I was an organizer in the Food, Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.