Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

I hope that my ideas attract a lively dialogue, even if my sentences are simple. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony, too. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency."

Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.

I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.