If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out.

It has been explained to me that toys are packaged in shards, to be assembled by the middle-aged and butter-fingered, because this makes it easier for the shippers. ... If they had to spend hours and hours putting handlebars onto bicycles ... they would repent their ways and deliver something that looked like a rocking horse and not like the result of a small street accident.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.

To me having a party is something like having a baby. The fact that you got through the last one alive is not somehow sufficiently reassuring now.

Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review, it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event, is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism, does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way, but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.