Dave Barry Quotes

I can't recall a story that played out exactly as I'd expected it to. That's one of the thrills of journalism - being surprised, and learning new stuff, but it also poses the biggest challenge to a writer's character.

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene . . .

The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas")

I like golf because you can be really terrible at it, and still not look much dorkier than anybody else.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

Recently I began to feel this void in my life, even after meals, and I said to myself, "Dave, all you do with your spare time is sit around and drink beer. You need a hobby." So I got a hobby. I make beer.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

The method preferred by most balding men for making themselves look silly is called the comb over.

For a while I got into the South Pacific theater of World War II. I read "American Caesar" by William Manchester, the biography of General MacArthur. Because of that I ended up reading "Tales of the South Pacific" by James Michener and then because of that reading his "Hawaii." That is what happens.

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meals.

Just get on any major highway, and eventually it will dead-end in a Disney parking area large enough to have its own climate, populated by large nomadic families who have been trying to find their cars since the Carter administration.

I think I've learned over the years, because you'd have to be stupid not to, that when a book publisher gives you a deadline they're just kidding for the most part. I don't know what they do with it, it's like you send them your book and they just hold it in their hands for like six months and I don't know why, and you realize you probably had more time.

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Reading... a vacation for the mind.

When doctors describe pain as experiencing "discomfort," it's like saying Hiroshima experienced "urban renewal".

I had no shoes and I pitied myself. Then I met a man who had no feet, so I took his shoes.

Never allow a child to spend all of his allowance. Insist that he set aside a certain amount of money every week and put it in a safe place, where you can get it if you need to buy beer.

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

I read "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. I never start the day without reading me some [Marcel] Proust.

I grew up in the Southwest Bronx. Father an accountant, mother a schoolteacher. Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying.

At the height of rush hour, people on the London underground actually say "excuse me." Imagine what would happen if you tried an insane stunt like that on the New York City subway. The other passengers would take it as a sign of weakness, and there'd be a fight over who got to keep your ears as a trophy.

John Dorschner, one of our staff writers here at Tropic magazine at The Miami Herald, who is a good friend of mine and an excellent journalist, but a raving liberal, wrote a story about a group that periodically pops up saying that they're going to start their own country or start their own planet or go back to their original planet, or whatever. They were going to "create a libertarian society" on a floating platform in the Caribbean somewhere. I know there's never going to be a country on a floating anything, but if they want to talk about it, that's great.

Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says "7x9=63," because it will remind him of mother.

If you look at photos of the Gettysburg Address there's a guy off to the right who I think is Keith Richards.

Whatever the needs of the public are, the government responds to those needs by getting larger.

To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess you call your life.

Chair lifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.

Dogs make good pets because they are very loyal

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.

Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.

After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.

In foreign countries such as Italy, the government puts strict-looking speed limit signs everywhere, but nobody ever sees them because light does not travel fast enough to catch the Italian drivers.

I, alone, could never have produced this book. I say this mainly in case there are lawsuits.

No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.

The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

The major advantage of domestic travel is that, with a few exceptions such as Miami, most domestic locations are conveniently situated right here in the United States.

Can we move this conversation along, I'm getting frightfully tired of 'hoa'.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School.

Megahertz: This is really, really big hertz.

Orangutan are very weird animals but they look very soulful.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

Computers operate on simple principles that can be easily understood by anybody with some common sense, a little imagination, and an IQ of 750.