[A] nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Fuller’s cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.

One [television] program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.

Those who live by electronics die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or to get the laundry done.

Puritanism had fallen into such disrepair that not even the oldest spinster thought of putting Susanna in a ducking stool; not even the oldest farmer suspected that Susanna’s diabolical beauty had made his cow run dry.