If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average.

Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy.

Some scholars are like donkeys, they merely carry a lot of books.

A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.

We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.

Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring Chile. Murray just got a new camera and is constantly snapping pictures. One day, without knowing it, he photographs a top-secret military installation. In an instant, armed troops surroun

Brahma said: Well, after hearing ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser. But an intelligent man needs only two thousand five hundred.

My father was a creole, his father a Negro, and his father a monkey; my family, it seems, begins where yours left off.

... before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes s

Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs.

I've touch'd the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory I haste now to my setting. I shall fall, Like a bright exhalation in the evening And no man see me more.

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.

A full belly makes a dull brain.

Mundus vult decipi decipiatur ergo.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when the're reading to themselves.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circum- stances being what they

I know on which side my bread is buttered.

So little time, so little to do.

Some men are heterosexual, and some are bisexual, and some men don't think about sex at all... they become lawyers.

The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

A woman's a woman until the day she dies, but a man's only a man as long as he can.

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.

I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to buy

The old complaint that mass culture is designed for eleven-year-olds is of course a shameful canard. The key age has traditionally been more like fourteen.

There's such a thing as too much point on a pencil.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

The optimum committee has no members.

You can never do just one thing.

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.

"Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest."

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind.

How should they answer?

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.

XXI: It's easy to get a loan unless you need it. XXII: If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice. XXIII: Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated. XXIV:

Better late than never.

Imagine what we can imagine!

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

"I have to convince you, or at least snow you ..."

Sorry 'bout that sweat, honey. That's just holy water.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

A violent man will die a violent death.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

All of us should treasure his Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: "Just lie down on the floor and keep calm

I just asked myself... what would John DeLorean do?

He jests at scars who never felt a wound.

A good reputation is more valuable than money.

It was a female that drove me to drink and I didn't even have the kindness to thank her.

If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Naked children have never played in _o_u_r fountains, and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

Being a miner, as soon as you're too old and tired and sick and stupid to do your job properly, you have to go, where the very opposite applies with the judges.

Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

"There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial: both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him during the trial."

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 o'clock.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Delay not, Caesar. Read it instantly.

Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.

Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.

Turn the other cheek.

Anything is possible on paper.

Well, you know, no matter where you go, there you are.

We'll be recording at the Paradise Friday night. Live, on the Death label.

Prizes are for children.

Fortune's Guide to Freshman Notetaking: WHEN THE PROFESSOR SAYS: YOU WRITE: Probably the greatest quality of the poetry John Milton

October 12, the Discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealings with men.

We can embody the truth, but we cannot know it.

In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Co

I need another lawyer like I need another hole in my head.

Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash.

The man who runs may fight again.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".

"We're not talking about the same thing," he said. "For you the world is weird because if you're not bored with it you're at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to

There is no fool to the old fool.

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax.

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. [...] I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk w

Never take a resume seriously. Resumes only make money for the people who write the resumes. No resume ever tells an employer how many times a job applicant has had the clap. Why, indeed, would anyone hire a person based on a resume written by a

The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.