People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don't cross.
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
Until feminists started wailing about the female's passivity, submissiveness, and something called 'victim status,' I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.
American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.
I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.
In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' I couldn't take my eyes off Judith Anderson as Big Mama.
I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.
Democracy elevates by turning ordinary people into extraordinary ordinary people called celebrities.
If the West Point class of 1915 is called 'the class the stars fell on' for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood's gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in '40s-era movies.
Let's face it: 'Threatening' people are the only interesting people around. The unthreatening are, by and large, competent mediocrities who take lemming-like aim at careers in television.
We are incapable of leaving anything to the imagination and loath to leave anything out. Maniacal thoroughness has become our national verbal ideal.
Feminists, I hasten to add, are not all bad. In fact, they are an ideal bellwether, an invaluable aid in helping me form opinions on issues that I don't have time to keep up with. If the feminists are for it, I'm against it; if the feminists are against it, I'm for it.
Whenever people are confronted by a prediction for the future that they simply cannot or will not believe, they always say, 'It will never happen in my lifetime.' If the prediction is something they deplore and fear, they say it with calculated bravado, often adding a smug, snorty hhrrummph.
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.
