All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching.

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.

Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?

The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

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

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.

Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.

There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.

I want to gag sometimes when I see who "we" are recommending that people vote for, and not just as a libertarian.

Being must be felt. It can't be thought.

Being happy is knowing how to be content with little

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

I came to realize clearly that the mind is no other than the Mountain and the Rivers and the great wide Earth, the Sun and the Moon and the Sky”.

Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience . . . is increasingly visual.