humor

"It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor."

"Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake"hate."

"V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love."

"I wouldn't say I'm superficial, just averagely ficial."

"One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for communicating ideas. Not editorial comment, but observation."

"If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere."

"No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to."

"Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh."

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."

"Artists exist to show us the world. So do windows."

"There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them."

"I love the Swedish people for their detective novels, their archipelago, their sense of humor, their carbonated vodka, and most especially, for their wonderful hospitality."

"I look at things logically. The humor I do is to go from A to B to C to D, and F is the funny."

"I just sprayed cologne on my hand and then pet the back of my cat's head while he slept, and he woke up so confused, trying to sniff behind his neck and all around wondering what sweet attack he was under."

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

"He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet."

"The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there's a man she's been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, 'What is he doing?' She says you don't sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her."

"Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy."

"A woman has to be intelligent, have charm, a sense of humor, and be kind. It's the same qualities I require from a man."

"Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping."