A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
|
A new star with a tremendous national appeal, the skill of a consummate showman.
|
A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
|
Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
|
Americans like fat books and thin women.
|
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.
|
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
|
Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
|
Disguises thinner than a Chicago stripteaser's work clothes.
|
Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
|
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
|
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
|
I was converted from fool [when] my spine [was] somewhat reorganized... What amazed me was how fast a perfectly robust man looking forward to nothing more terminal than a night in Toledo can cease being alive once he pulls the dreamboat out of the driveway.
|
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
|
In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
|
Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
|
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
|
It was dramatic to watch [my grandmother] decapitate [a turkey] with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with "gourmet" status.
|
Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
|
Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
|
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
|
Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost
|
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
|
People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
|
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
|
Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
|
Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on "canned" laughter grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
|
Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
|
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
|
The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight.
|
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
|
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
|
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
|
What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
|
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
|
You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
|