What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

I feel it is important to point out that individuals can make a difference, that things that seem impossible one day might suddenly shift into a possibility the next day.

No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused

Audiences don't ever disappoint me, in the sense that movies I feel really good about, they usually feel really good about too.

Gardeners do first, read later. Why not? Plants are very gracious in accepting an apology.

When it's all over, you're remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do.

My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on Bobby Lee, for I shall have none.

I'm a regular person with an extraordinary job.

Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness.

Have faith in man, whether he appears to you to be a very learned one or a most ignorant one