I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?

Being a personality is not the same thing as having a personality.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Can anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.

Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren't called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)