The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
Discussion in America means dissent.
The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
