Dave Barry Quotes

Canada, as you know, is a major important nation boasting a sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture that was tragically destroyed last week by beavers.

Talking about golf is always boring. Playing golf can be interesting, but not the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive the cart.

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

What's happened to marriage? The wedding-industrial complex. Brides get swept up in this world of obsession - it has to be your perfect day.

He was distracted by a giggle, and turned to see a rare sight: a girl.

If, when you talk to people, they keep backing away from you, it's because you're TOO CLOSE, alright? SO DON'T KEEP ADVANCING ON THEM LIKE A HUMAN GLACIER.

Why do we shave? It doesn't seem like a natural activity. There are no examples of shaving in nature. The only creature that comes close is the male South Pacific Groping Beetle, which sometimes, just before mating, will slap on a little Aqua Velva. But we think this resulted from atomic testing.

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean: Eel with big abcess.

Weddings are crazy. When you get right down to it, a wedding is a party, and not an important party, really. But for young people, it becomes the biggest thing in their lives. After it's over, they realize it wasn't that big a deal.

During bomb drills, we students were told to crouch under our desks. Apparently the desks used in classrooms in the fifties were made of an exceptionally missile-resistant variety of wood. During the Cold War years I often wondered why it never occurred to our defense planners to protect the entire nation from nuclear attack by simply covering it, from sea to shining sea, with a huge Strategic Classroom Desk.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything.

Sign outside a country shop: We buy junk and sell antiques.

We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as: 1. Peeing on everything. 2. When we're driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles. 3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.

Disney Resort and World and Compound, a place where your dreams really do come true, if you dream about having people wearing enormous cartoon-animal heads come around to your restaurant table and act whimsical and refuse to go away until you laugh with delight.

I'm afraid that, in this chapter we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys.

I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.

Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.

The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

The central point of this final chapter is that - follow my logic carefully here - unless you die, you will continue to get older. (It's insights like this that separate the professional book author from the person with a real job.)

A full-grown manatee, which can weigh more than 1,000 pounds, looks like the result of a genetic experiment involving a walrus and the Goodyear Blimp.

The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn't remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he's telling the truth.

Today's toys contain computer chips, so they can move and talk; this stimulates the mind of your child. Notice I say "your child." MY child just wants to eat the toys.

normal person's weekly chore list: 1. clean kitchen. 2. clean bathroom. 3. clean entire rest of domicile. cleaning impaired person's weekly chore list: 1. don't get peanut butter on sheets.

In modern America, food is abundant everywhere except aboard commercial airplanes.

Yet another spunky li'l NASA robot lands and begins transmitting back photographs of rocks that appear virtually identical to the rock photos beamed back by all the other spunky li'l NASA robots, thus confirming suspicions that the universe has a LOT of rocks in it.

Sir,” James asked, “what are we going to do?” “We’re going to look for water,” said Alf. “And food?” said Tubby Ted. “Water first,” said Alf. “We can go days without food.” “We can what?” Tubby Ted shouted.

His body rigid with terror as he waited for the savages to something horrible to him—bash his head with clubs, or stab him with spears, or… …or tap him on the shoulder.

A critical function that we journalists perform at political conventions is to try to get into parties that we have not been invited to. There are dozens of these parties, sponsored by large corporations with a sincere public-spirited desire to become larger.

I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.

What women want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What men want: Tickets to the World Series.

Never trust anything you read in a travel article.

I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.

UNIVAC: a device, which contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,500 square feet and weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons.

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use

Note that both of these papers [the New York Post and the New York Daily News] are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the opera.

...Hell, which as every frequent traveler knows, is in Concourse D of O'Hare Airport.

It is important to be nice. But sometimes niceness can be misconstrued as weak. Should we be nice to everybody? Should we be nice only when others are nice to us? Here are some interesting views about being nice. Read these nice quotes and turn on your niceness.

It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

I read Warren Zevon's bizarre biography, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." His wife, Crystal Zevon, posthumously published a journal he wrote and some interviews with ex-band members. Like [Keith] Richards's book "Life," it's brutally honest.

I never had the vaguest idea whether any of it had anything to do with me, especially being a sixth grader. When I got older and traveled, I'd read about the history of where I was going. I'd be like, "Oh, history is kind of interesting."

Each year, millions of skiers come to Colorado to experience its superb emergency medical facilities.

But that's kind of an easy stance to be if you're a humor columnist, because you're tending to make fun of the government and the powerful. I'm sort of a soft-core libertarian in that my compass is generally pointing away from 'Let's let the government do this' Does it matter to me that it's Democrats who think we need more elaborate programs that involve shifting money from one group to another group or it's Republicans saying we need to take a harder look at what kinds of things people are watching on cable TV? Neither one of those things strikes me as a good idea.

This (America) is a land of rich diversity, from the towering skyscrapers of Manhatan all the way to the towering mounds of garbage piled up next to the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Within less than an hour, Chuck and I easily located what could well be the correct platform, where we pass the time by perspiring freely until the train storms in, colorfully decorated, as is the tradition in New York, with the spray-painted initials of all the people it has run over.