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.

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.

Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity.

You can’t enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils 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.

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.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.

Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.

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.

Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don’t work, those that break down and those that get lost.

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.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.

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.

People who say you’re just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

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.

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.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.