Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... . On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

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.

That's why God created marriage, so people wouldn't have to fight with strangers.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Where I come from, when a Catholic marries a Lutheran it is considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis.

People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length.