"I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise."

"For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption."

"We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under."

"Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain."

"I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope."

"I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material."

"Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats."

"I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car."

"Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful."

"When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever."

"My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines."

"A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)"

"Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid."

"I clearly re-call standing on in downtown Melbourne, so freshly arrived that I still smelled of (possibly even glistened from) the insecticide with which the flight attendants sprayed the plane before arrival, watching the clanging trams and swirl of humanity, and thinking, “Good Lord, there's a country here.”"

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."

"There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said "he had always wanted to be generous to a fault"."

"We’d all like t’vote fer th’best man, but he’s never a candidate."

"Men are not punished for their sins, but by them."

"There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose."

"Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count."

"Nobody can be as agreeable as an uninvited guest."

"Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid."

"Kin Hubbard is dead. To us folks that attempt to write a little humor his death is just like Edison's would be to the world of invention. No man in our generation was within a mile of him, and I am so glad that I didn't wait for him to go to send flowers. I have said it from the stage and in print for twenty years. Just think — only two lines a day, yet he expressed more original philosophy in 'em than all the rest of the paper combined. What a kick Twain and all that gang will get out of Kin."

"Nine-tenths of our crimes an' calamities are made possible by th' automobile. It has unleashed all th' pent-up criminal tendencies o' th' ages. It's th' central figure in murders, hold-ups, burglaries, accidents, elopements, failures an' abscondments. It has well nigh jimmed th' American home.... No girl is missin' that wuzn' last seen steppin' in a strange automobile.... An' ther hain't a day rolls by that somebuddy hain't sellin' ther sewin' machine, or ther home, or somethin' t' pay on an automobile.... Maybe th' jails an' workhouses are empty, but that's not because th' world is gittin' better. It's because all th' criminals escape in automobiles."

"Th' only way t' entertain some folks is t' listen t' 'em."

"When a fellow says, "It hain't the money, but th' principle o' the thing," it's th' money."

"Bees are not as busy as we think they are. They jest can't buzz any slower."

"Some people are so sensitive that they feel snubbed if an epidemic overlooks them."

"Some folks can look so busy doin' nothin' that they seem indispensable."

"Flattery won’t hurt you if you don’t swallow it."

"It's purty hard t' be efficient without bein' obnoxious."

"Ther's still a few honest folks left but they never seem t' find anything you lose."

"Nobuddy ever listened t' reason on a empty stomach."

"If at first you do succeed don't take any more chances."

"Never tell the box-office man that you can't hear well or he will sell you a seat where you can't see either."

"Now an' then an innocent man is sent t' th' legislature."

"Gittin' talked about is one o' th' penalties for bein' purty, while bein' above suspicion is about th' only compensation fer bein' homely."

"Don't knock th' weather. Nine-tenths o' th' people couldn' start a conversation if it didn' change once in a while."

"The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor, but that he made you smile."

"Three of us — Bill Styron, he and I — suffered depression simultaneously, so we walked around in the rain together on Martha's Vineyard and consoled each other... He did the best to make life palatable, to help you be optimistic, to let you know he believed you would beat it. We both did, and so did Bill. We named ourselves the 'Blues Brothers.'"

"The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret."

"The bad boy tweaking the nose of the Establishment [with] the countenance of a Jewish leprechaun."

"What Art had was the gift of laughter — that's a rarity today. He could take simple ordinary things and make you laugh. God knows all of us need that. I've been with him in all kinds of situations, good and bad, triumph and tragedy but Art always was able to see a little wisp of humor in everything."

"I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies."

"Don't commit suicide, because you might change your mind two weeks later."

"Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got."

"Art was the Mark Twain of our time. For decades there was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art's column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously. The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of times better."

"People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him."