| 9 March, 2009 |
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The Irish are a fair people - they never speak well of one another. I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on. If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies. I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives. Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions. A man must properly pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra had to be subsidized. Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. New York: where everyone mutinies but no one deserts. England has forty-two religions and only two sauces. My heart is pure as the driven slush. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. God heals, and the doctor takes the fee. Humility is no substitute for a good personality. I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all. Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. A chic type, a rough type, an odd type - but never a stereotype. When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones. We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience. What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers. There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist- the taxidermist leaves the hide. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it. Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars. One of these days, the people are going to demand peace of the government, and the government is going to have to give it to them. God must hate common people, because he made them so common. Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists. Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers. If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup. Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. Sexual enlightenment is justified insofar as girls cannot learn too soon how children do not come into the world. Nothing spoils a confession like repentance. In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it. Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed. Communism is like one big phone company. Destiny...is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. The bonds that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each others life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. |
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