What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very different things.

Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

I always advise people never to give advice.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.

The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.

I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal.

Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.

The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.

Faith is a dark night for man, but in this very way it gives him light.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

Politicians in their hubris who believe they can ignore debt or wish it away are sorely disappointed - as we see now with the plummeting approval ratings of both the administration and Congress.