"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."

"Soon my father had payed the check and gave the waiter a lordly bribe and once more we sprang into the machine and was on our way."

"Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly."

"Today's Real Man is probably closest to Spencer Tracy or Gary Cooper in spirit; he realizes that while birds, flowers, poetry, and small children do not add to the quality of life in quite the same manner as a Super Bowl and six-pack of Budweiser, he's learned to appreciate them anyway."

"I Could Never Have Sex With Any Man Who Has So Little Regard For My Husband."

""I'm sorry I ever met you" is effective enough, but how much more piquant is the same communication expressed as: "I rue the day I met you"."

"There's nobody like Andy, and there never will be. He'll hate hearing this, but he's an American original."

"President Reagan must be happy over how bad the weather's been this winter, because its the one thing no one's blaming on him. Theres nothing television news likes better than bad weather, and we sure get a lot of it in the United States."

"I wish people who sell things would stop trying to guess how many of something we want to buy. I want to buy things one at a time."

"The one affectation I have forced on the publisher … are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter."

"At the end of every television broadcast, the names of the people who worked on it are listed. Why, you may ask yourself sometimes, would so many people want to take credit for such a bad show? Well, its just like what's happened to the dollar. Credits in television suffer from inflation. There are more of them and they arent worth what they used to be, even on a good show."

"Ive had quite a few complaints lately from people who like it when I complain about things. They say I havent complained about anything lately. So tonight, for you complaint fans, I have a complaint."

"Some banks get stuck with a name that sounded good a hundred years ago when they were founded but sounds kind of silly now. In New York, there's a Dime Savings Bank. Once you pass forty, a dime isn't worth bending over to pick up if you drop one. You certainly wouldn't bother to take it to a bank to save it."

"Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from themselves by their government. Republicans believe people are basically bad but they'll be okay if they're left alone."

"I want to live my next life backwards: You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day. Then you get kicked out for being too healthy. Enjoy your retirement and collect your pension. Then when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're too young to work. You get ready for High School: drink alcohol, party, and you're generally promiscuous. Then you go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, and you have no responsibilities. Then you become a baby, and then... You spend your last 9 months floating peacefully in luxury, in spa-like conditions - central heating, room service on tap, and then... You finish off as an orgasm."

"It's a sad day at 60 Minutes and for everybody here at CBS News. It's hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much."

"According to child-experts—and every child is an expert on something—the function of a parent is to provide information, entertainment, transportation, and spot cash on demand."

"The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it."

"An aphorism can contain only as much wisdom as overstatement will permit."

"Not to cover the subject, but to uncover and isolate a part of it … is the aim of the aphorist"

"Both the aphorism and the poem channel man’s wild impulse to escape the systems another part of him has so carefully constructed."

"When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before."

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else*"

"You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism."

"The grass is always greener over the septic tank."

"If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?"

"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

"I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive."

"There's a big difference between the words, ‘naked’ and ‘nekkid.’ ‘Naked’ means you don't have any clothes on. ‘Nekkid’ means you don't have any clothes on - and you're up to something."

"I know lots of people who are educated far beyond their intelligence."

"Nothing matters at all. Survival is the coin of the realm. Time is a river with banks."

"Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition. To surmise was not to conquer, of course; he was as helpless as ever but there was a dim liberation in seeing how he had been lied to, and he felt that at least he could take one thing from the terrible years through which he had come: he was free of self-delusion."

"…as indifferent to the meaning and central absurdity of the situation as swallows in a cathedral."

"Great recrimination demands a large subject, will invent one if it does not exist."

"There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise."

"“Events,” I say to the Captain, “events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation. Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons.”"

"Late that last night, as I sat alone watching the interviews and the speeches and the what-not, she shouted to turn that thing off and come to bed. Once again politics had made estranged bedfellows."

"TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done."

"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."

"Who would have thought that the fatal flaw of communism would be that there's no money it."

"That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you."

"There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a BILLION people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you."

"Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. (Or, for that matter, as true.)"

"Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them."

"The silhouette was named for Etienne de Silhouette, the notoriously stingy finance minister for Louis XV, who ironically was himself incapable of casting a shadow, due to lycanthropy."

"Like most experts, I've always defined a planet in common-sense terms: Can you beam down to it? Is it populated by green-skinned women? Would Galactus eat it for food?"

"And parents, some old fashioned kitchen wisdom for dealing with those lice: take your child and cover his hair with mayonnaise and shove him outside because he disgraced your house by bringing lice into it."

"(on soccer) Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war."

"This pie chart represents the $70 billion in tax cuts, and the majority of that will go to people making over $200,000 a year. Or, as the government refers to them, "citizens.""

"You can't fight a war on terror if you're ending a sentence with a preposition."