If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

People who do not understand pigeons―and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them―should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons.

It didn't work," said the King. "The cloak of invisibility didn't work.""Yes, it did," said the Royal Wizard."No, it didn't," said the King. "I kept bumping into things, the same as ever.""The cloak is supposed to make you invisible," said the Royal Wizard. "It is not supposed to keep you from bumping into things.""All I know is, I kept bumping into things," said the King.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.