If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.

A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

I don't want them to be told to remember me.