What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn’t how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to...

And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted...

Bertrand Russell declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, “Sir, you did not give us enough information.” I would add to that, “All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that...

He had a W.C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.

Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world and it replies in kind.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been...

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, ‘You’re a MAN now!’I damn near killed my first German.

We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re ten…. Most kids can’t afford to...

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and...

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing...

…we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this...

It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.

And Castle nodded sagely. ‘So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”Do you really agree?’ I asked. ‘A minute ago you said something about Jesus.”Who?’ said Castle.’Jesus Christ?”Oh,’...

Flashlight beams danced crazily

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

I’d rather have written ‘Cheers’ than anything I’ve written.

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;Man got to tell himself he understand.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show...

There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost...

Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir.” he read, “You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only...

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would...

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.The rarest of these specialists, he says,...

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of...

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor,...

He was talking about the sign that said ‘THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.”All knew was that I didn’t want my daughter or anybody’s child to see a message that negative every time she comes into...

My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don’t read much or think much — who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

That’s the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby– that’s wonderful, when actually they’re...

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with

E’ chiaro che capisco che la ripugnanza ispirata persino adesso, e forse per sempre, dalla parola “comunismo” è una degna risposta alla crudeltà e ottusità dei dittatori dell’URSS, che si erano definiti comunisti con lo...

It posed the question posed by all such stone piles.: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones...

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.