The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

The food in such places is so tasteless because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out.

The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?

When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere.

The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.

Health food makes me sick.

As far as I'm concerned, "whom" is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Getting a tattoo would probably make me cry.

I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.

I do remember in high school I wanted to be a disc jockey.

I don't cook. I don't know anything about food. I've never reviewed a restaurant.

I'm more disturbed when people expect me to be serious.

I've always thought that parallel parking was my main talent.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny.

People, not just reporters, are more interested in politics than in government, so the actual issues wouldn't be something that interested them.

There's always a source for humor.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

What campaigns are for is weeding out the people who, for one way or another, weren't making it for the long haul.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

When you're writing, you are robbed of your delivery.

With humor, it's so subjective that trying to think of what the ideal reader would think would drive you crazy.

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

One advantage of a monarchy is that a monarchy does not suffer the effects of having great clots of white Christians moping around simply because they aren't the king or queen.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.