Aphorists

"In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing."

"When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling."

"As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can."

"Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be."

"Whether or not you love television, you've got to admit that it certainly loves itself."

"A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners."

"If everyone gave a tenth of his worldly goods to the person he most admired, the rich would just get richer."

"How strange that the young should always think the world is against them when in fact that is the only time it is for them."

"If an article is attractive, or useful, or inexpensive, they'll stop making it tomorrow; if it's all three, they stopped making it yesterday."

"The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried."

"Being Irish is, no matter how real, a pose."

"Money is the best counterfeit money."

"I'm glad I don't have to explain to a man from Mars why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper, and then put them in my mouth."

"What a shame that allowances have to stop with the teens: both those that are paid to us and those that are made for us."

"I have seen messed-up people of forty who still seemed salvageable, and children of six or seven who almost surely were not."

"Cash is the one gift everyone despises and no one turns down."

"I do not trust those who are above name-dropping. The suppression of small vices always exacts too high a toll."

"You never realize how tacky your furniture is till you try to give it to the Salvation Army and they won't take it."

"Good food, good sex, good digestion, good sleep: to these basic animal pleasures, man has added nothing but the good cigarette."

"Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back."

"There are now electrical appliances with the main unit so sealed in that it cannot be got at for repair. There have always been human beings like that."

"If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you."

"It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't."

"We work for praise, and dawdle once we have it."

"There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than."

"My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I’m ashamed of what I think of doctors in general."

"If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors."

"There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later."

"Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty."

"We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence."

"Insult, not flattery, is the great aphrodisiac."

"The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol."

"Young lovers and young nations face the same problem: after orgasm, what?"

"The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth."

"To smoke or not to smoke: I can make of either a life work."

"Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix."

"People who won't have a TV set in their house get more pleasure from their refusal than most of us get from TV."

"Life's most painful condition: to be almost a celebrity."

"Most of us would rather risk catastrophe than read the directions."

"My religious position: I think that God could do a lot better, and I'm willing to give Him the chance."

"No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive."

"Every now and then you run across radiantly attractive people and you're delighted to find they adore you, till you realize that they adore just about everybody- and that's what's made them radiantly attractive."

"Forget about calories - everything makes thin people thinner, and fat people fatter."

"How tired God must be of guilt and loneliness, for that is all we ever bring to Him."

"Did that leave an undesirable taste in your mouth? Let’s take a swig."

"There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write."

"Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's."

"A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote."

"Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul."

"Revenge leads to an empty fullness, like eating dirt."