"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"Never judge a book by its movie."
— J.W. Eagan

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

"Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."
— Robert Orben

"To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I've wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"Once I pulled a job, I was so stupid. I picked a guy's pocket on an airplane and made a run for it."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"A funny thing is if you're out hiking and your friend gets bit by a poisonous snake, tell him you're going for help, then go about ten feet and pretend YOU got bit by a snake. Then start an argument about who's going to get help. A lot of guys will start crying. That's why it makes you feel good when you tell them it was just a joke."
— Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts)

"What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. Why, every time I shut the window I hurt somebody's fingers."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."
— Woody Allen (Annie Hall)

"I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel."
— Terry Pratchett

"Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon..."
— Terry Pratchett

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
— Niels Bohr

"You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity. "
— Bullet Tooth Tony (Snatch)

"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it"
— Fernando Pessoa

"procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday"
— don marquis via archy

"Soap is to the body what laughter is to the soul"
— Yiddish proverb

"There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."
— Woody Allen (Annie Hall)

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine."
— Peter Ustinov

"'It smells terrible in here.'

'Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.'"
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"After all, what could you expect from a pig but a grunt?"
— L.M. Montgomery

"Rhett: If you've made up your mind to impale someone, do it with conviction."
— Rowena Cherry (Knight's Fork)

"'...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.'

'What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.'

'Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.'"
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"What in the blue star-blazes did you see in Jason?" he asked, still forcefully but with his frustration and jealousy under better control.

"For one thing, Djetth, he wasn't trying to kill me!"

("Marsh", heroine of Insufficient Mating Material)"
— Rowena Cherry (Insufficient Mating Material)

"So the biblical scholars mis-translated the Hebrew word for "young woman" into the Greek word for "virgin," which was a pretty easy mistake to make, since there is only a subtle difference in the spelling. But back then it was the "virgin" that caught people's attention. It's not every day a virgin conceives and bears a son. So you keep that for a couple of hundred years, and the next thing you know, you have the Roman Catholic church. "
— Franky Four Fingers (Snatch)

"Have you ever crossed the road, and looked the wrong way? A car's nearly on you? So what do you do? Something very silly. You freeze. Your life doesn't flash before you, 'cause you're too fuckin' scared to think - you just freeze and pull a stupid face. But the pikey didn't. Why? Because he had plans of running the car over. "
— Turkish (Snatch)

"You have that vacant look in your eyes that says 'hold my head to your ear and you will hear the sea'."
— Londo Mollari - Babylon 5

"If looks could kill, I am a-dead now. "
— Roberto Benigni (Down by Law)

"Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section."
— Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club)

"If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

"If you neglected to warn Djetth beforehand that you were going to shoot him down, Your Highness, he may consider you in breach of contract...

-- Rhett"
— Rowena Cherry (Insufficient Mating Material)

"My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument."
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836-1854)

"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.

I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"... all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face."
— Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)

"Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity."
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid"
— Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint)