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"Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get. Unless, of course, you're sitting next to Roger Ebert -- then you know you're not going to get any."
--David Letterman, the 1995 Academy Awards

"Her father is not at all what I expected. I had envisioned a wiry, squint-eyed little pissant -- a gun store owner type, with fading flagrant tattoos of women on emaciated biceps, a man with a cruel streak for minorities. But that is the man of bad stereotype, the kind my writing career foundered over and probably should have. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being."
--Excerpt from The Sportswriter, a novel by Richard Ford

"After the Town Hall is filled with the Spring's harvest of lilacs, daisies, and peonies, the parade is slowly formed on Main Street. First come the three Marshals on plough horses (going sideways), then the Warden and Burgesses in carriages, the Village Cornet Band, the G.A.R., two by two, the Militia... while the volunteer Fire Brigade, drawing the decorated hose-cart, with its jangling bells, brings up the rear -- the inevitable swarm of small boys following. The march to Wooster Cemetery is a thing a boy never forgets. The roll of muffled drums and Adeste Fidelis answer for the dirge. A little girl on the fencepost waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg..."
--Charles Ives, on Decoration (Memorial) Day, in 1880s Danbury, Connecticut

"Gene Rayburn, the host of TV's long-running Match Game, died this week at the age of 81. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you send 'blank'."
--Saturday Night Live; Colin Quinn on "Weekend Update", 12/11/99

"The recent probe to Mars has returned irrefutable evidence that the red planet is populated with kittens. These "kittens" do not give birth and do not die but are forever locked in a state of eternal kittenhood. Of course, without further investigation, scientists are reluctant to call he chirpy little creatures kittens. 'Just because they look like kittens and act like kittens is no reason to assume they are kittens,' said one researcher. 'A football is a brown thing that bounces around on grass, but it would be wrong to call it a puppy.' ... Some have suggested that the hostility of the Martian climate should be enough to seriously set back the long-term prospects of any species. However, the weakness of Martian gravity is a bonus for felines. They are able to leap almost three times as high as they can on Earth. They can climb twice as far up a carpet-covered post, and a ball with a bell in it will roll almost three times as far. (This is at least equal to the distance a mature poodle can roll a ball with its nose.)"
--Steve Martin, in an excerpt from Pure Drivel

"Robert Redford makes his offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana (Demi Moore) -- no aftermath, no strings. 'It's just my body,' Diana explains. 'It's not my mind.' I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?"
--From Anthony Lane's review of Indecent Proposal; The New Yorker, 4/26/93

"Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people's faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra... they fall into a cataleptic state -- they scratch themselves unconsciously or they remember suddenly a show window in which there was displayed a scarf or a hat; they remember every detail of that window with amazing clarity, but where it was exactly, they can't recall; and that bothers them, keeps them wide awake, restless, and they listen now with redoubled attention because they are wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they will not lose consciousness of that show window and that scarf that was hanging there, or the hat."
--Excerpt from Tropic Of Cancer, by Henry Miller

"Come the millenium, I think the greatest demand on the part of mass audiences is going to be for individuality."
--Mary Wells Lawrence, in Advertising Age

"Nothing is so commonplace as the desire to be remarkable."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes

"After I die, I shall return to earth as a gatekeeper of a bordello and I won't let any of you in."
-- Arturo Toscanini, to the NBC Symphony Orchestra

"Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tuscon is a cyclone fence, the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions' downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops' sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the retreating red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, a graph, an electrocardiogram of a dying day."
--David Foster Wallace, from his short story Forever Overhead

"I don't read Us, I read a magazine for paranoids called Them."
--Bruce Vilanch

"It feels so fine to be home, so fine, such a relief. Even though one of the upstairs radiators broke sometime during the week. And even though dinner will be a buffet of Paul Newman popcorn, a bag of Le Gourmet baby carrots, Michael Jordan cottage cheese one day past its sell-by date, and a pint of Cherry Garcia. At least the carrots aren't a celebrity brand, Lizzie thinks, staring at the microwave as the kernel pops accelerate. Up in the living room, Max and Louisa sit in the dark, watching Nickelodeon, Max flipping through every one of the seventy-six channels during every commercial break."
--An excerpt from Turn Of The Century, by Kurt Andersen

"Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one's ear must be one's guide: gut is a lustier word than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason."
--From Chapter 14 of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (1959)

"Honey, you a mess."
--Marlene Dietrich to Orson Welles, in Touch Of Evil (1958)

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