quotes by Columnist Quotes

“. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute - look at it and really see it - live it - and never give it back.”

“You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government!”

“Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity.”

“Every puppy should have a boy.”

“The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.”

“If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.”

“Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.”

“The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.”

“My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.”

“Derangement is the only possible explanation for owning a cat, an animal whose preferred mode of communication is to sink its claws three-quarters of an inch into your flesh.”

“Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order.”

“The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it.”

“As the saying goes: "If you're not part of the solution, you're a newspaper columnist."”

“I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank.”

“I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.”

“When I read that I had to go to Gettysburg.”

“A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.”

“This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.”

“... it's simply wrong to always order [kids] to stop that fighting. There are times when one child is simply defending his rights and damned well should be fighting.”

“We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as: 1. Peeing on everything. 2. When we're driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles. 3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.”

“I read a lot of lot non-demanding fiction.”

“There is no color line in death. I swear to the lord I still can't see Why Democracy means Everybody but me. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath - America will be! I am the American heartbreak- The rock on which Freedom Stumped its toe.”

“To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess you call your life.”

“Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."”

“What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.”

“The first of the month falls every month, too, North or South. And them white folks who sends bills never forgets to send them-the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.”

“If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%? In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf.”

“My son, Rob....said the only time he ever wraps a gift is, quote, "if it's such a poor gift that I don't want to be there when the person opens it."”

“The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.”

“Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.”

“There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace.”

“Sign at a Kentucky appliance store: Don't kill your wife. Let our washing machine do the dirty work.”

“Murphy's golden rule: Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”

“I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.”

“Violent anger makes me physically ill.”

“Dogs would make totally incompetent criminals. If you could somehow get a group of dogs to understand the concept of the Kennedy assassination, they would all immediately confess to it. Whereas you'll never see a cat display any kind of guilty behavior, despite the fact that several cats were seen in Dallas on the grassy knoll area, not that I wish to start rumors.”

“When you leave them in the morning, they stick their nose in the door crack and stand there like a portrait until you turn the key eight hours later.”

“Today's beauty ideal, strictly enforced by the media, is a person with the same level of body fat as a paper clip.”

“I like golf because you can be really terrible at it, and still not look much dorkier than anybody else.”

“The major parties could conduct live human sacrifices on their podiums during prime time, and I doubt that anybody would notice.”

“I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.”

“Life is an egg you have to be patient and careful with it or it will break.”

“Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonial of a woman who wore a dress that could slipcover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer.”

“Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean- so get yourself a little loving in between.”

“I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.”

“I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.”

“Editorials are written by people who have agreed to have several strong opinions a day and to write them down, provided they do not have to sign their names.”

“I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.”

“No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.”

“Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.”