I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without...

This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and fasting.” Is there a Christian in the whole world who would believe such a story if found in any other book?The trouble is, these pious...

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

If I didn’t laugh, absurdity would get the best of me.

Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to set any event down in print is immediately to begin to lie about it, thank goodness; and...

l’homme se trouve devant l’irrationnel. Il sent en lui son désir de bonheur et de raison. L’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.

The concept of absurdity is something I’m attracted to.

What lies between where you are and where you want to be sometimes requires traveling through the Twilight Zone.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Lovely sight, the Apocalypse! But absurdity, without limits? No Sir! there have to be certain limits…

At my last birthday party I had fun and really let myself go. Literally. I opened the cages where I keep my clones and I let myself go, all 333 versions of myself.

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all....

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it...

All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: ‘Only if I did not know that I was doing...

Life is sweet absurdity, Sir Wizard. Laugh your way through it.

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, ....

That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place,...

HAMM:Yesterday! What does that mean? Yesterday!CLOV (violently):That means that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me...

Christianity would be helpless without the idea of free will and the idea offree will would be helpless without incongruity.

Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.