Wealth is any income that is at least 100 dollars a year more than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Very few authors are able to do actual writing for more than three hours a day. In fact, a good many very successful ones average no more than an hour.

I don’t preach patience to you, but cynicism; it is the most comforting of philosophies. You will get over your present difficulties only to run into something worse, and so on until the last sad scene. Make up your mind to it—and then make the best of it. That is, do the best you can within the limits of your chance. If you can’t write a book a year, then write one every two years .