I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.

He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.