The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.