I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best — it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education...

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came

The rich aren’t like us, they pay less taxes

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly.

Everybody hates me because I’m so universally liked.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff – it is a palliative rather than a remedy

You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

Anyone informed that the universe is expanding and contracting in pulsations of eighty billion years has a right to ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

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