humor

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

"I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed." -Flaubert

Life's a Trip... ok.  I just want to know who packed for me...

Like going to the dentist, where you write: "Dental appointment today. All of the dentists in Boulder are 'holistic.' They can't fill a cavity but they're good for your soul. Your teeth rot, but apparently your spirit prospers."

"Perhaps there is a law operating in the universe that the one who bends his mind to a paradox ends up insolubly meshed within that paradox?  Perhaps the universe purely operates on wit, and the best joke, inducing the longest fit of cosmic giggles, becomes the operative law at the next quantum mind-shift?  If, as the physicist Arthur March puts it, "the world is inseparable from the observing subject and is accordingly not objectifiable," then perhaps undertaking the quest for prophetic knowledge, in itself, causes reality to shiver and shift, as new possibilities open like the petals of an extravagant, multidimensional flower?  The message, as I apparently received it, that "a quest to understand prophecy has become the fulfillment of prophecy," suggested some such wild card hypothesis."     

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

Radio Scripts Intro

I do enjoy having these little chats at the front of books. This is a complete lie, in fact. What actually happens is that you are battling away trying to finish, or at least start, a book you promised to deliver seven months ago, and faxes start arriving asking you if you could possibly write yet another short little introduction to a book that you clearly remember writing "The End" to in about 1981. It won't promises the fax, take you two minutes. Damn right it won't take you two minutes. It actually takes about thirteen hours and you miss another dinner party and your wife won't speak to you and the book gets so late that you start missing entire camping holidays in the Pyrenees and your wife won't talk to you, particularly since the camping holiday was your idea and not hers and she was only going on it because you wanted to and now she has to go and do it by herself when you know perfectly well that she hates camping. (So do I, incidentally. I am making this bit up). 

"Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!"

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.