MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.

Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.