Top 817 Quotes & Sayings by Dave Barry - Page 9

I read the whole Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. They don't take long.

I did all this stuff that was illegal when I was a kid. I drank beer when I was 15. I smoked cigarettes when I was 13. I drove to New York City when I was 14 - don't tell my son. Those things were against the law, but I did them anyway. I didn't become a heroin addict, although I probably could have gotten heroin somehow. I don't think my son would buy heroin at any price. He knows what it is, and he knows how stupid it is.

During the warm season (August 8 and 9), Maine is a true vacation paradise, offering visitors a chance to jump into crystal-clear mountain lakes and see if they can get back out again before their bodily tissue is frozen as solid as a supermarket turkey.

I think if you use Twitter and social media as your main source of information you are an idiot, but I think most people who use it know better, so I kind of enjoy it.

He could even think about how fast he was thinking about things.

Chair lifts need to be in some places so that we can get to wonderful views without having to hike to them.

The weightlifting competition I saw was the women's 63 kg class. I'm not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the weightlifting hall was 63 kg. There's no way to know for sure without finding out what a "kg" is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, then the terrorists have won.

It's a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property?

Directors are always changing things at the last minute. Actors will do a scene, and the director will say, ‘Okay, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of saying “What’s for dinner?” you say, “Wait a minute! Benzene is actually a hydrocarbon!” And say it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your character should have no arms.

Many, many of you have written to me asking the following question: 'Dave, have their been any new advancements in the field of artificial falcon insemination, and could these developments be used to improve the American electoral process?'

I never start a section of the story without knowing how it will end. I also consciously try to shape the story as though it were a movie.

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn't remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he's telling the truth.

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Line printer paper is strongest at the perforations.

RAM: This gives guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest memory. That's important, because the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages.

I would say that the single most important conclusion I reached, after traveling through Japan, as well as countless hours reading, studying, and analyzing this fascinating culture, is that you should always tighten the cap on the shampoo bottle before you put it in your suitcase.

The central point of this final chapter is that - follow my logic carefully here - unless you die, you will continue to get older. (It's insights like this that separate the professional book author from the person with a real job.)

In Los Angeles, the jury in the Reginald Denny Beating trial, after much thinking, concludes, that Person A is not necessarily trying to kill Person B just because Person A happens to very deliberately bash Person B's skull in with a brick. The verdict is applauded by scientists at the Tobacco Institute.

Long, long ago, before eruptions were invented, the molten lava had to be carried down the mountainside, bucket by bucket, and poured over the sleeping villagers. This took time.

We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

I've been checking with people back in South Florida to see if Hurricane Dennis is going to whack my house, and the consensus of the experts seems to be: No, it will not, unless it does, in which case, yes. So I'm feeling really calm over here in London.

I'm a humorist. A guy like Paul Simon just makes my life so much simpler. When I was there, he had a hearing against hate. Steven Spielberg came and testified against hate. Paul Simon said hate was bad. Orrin Hatch was there, and he was against hate too. Everyone was opposed to hate. Is this really a wonderful way to spend our tax dollars, to have these men drone away about how against hate they are?

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.

There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump—an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.

But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles which are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out in America) to sue you.

Earnest is our dog. She senses instantly that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring nurturing instinct that all female dogs have, she tries to lick my ears off.

maybe somebody finally shot the dog.

Leonard Aster thanked Fighting Prawn and the Mollusk tribe for their hospitality. “You mean,” said Fighting Prawn, “for not killing you?” “Yes,” said Leonard. “It was very gracious of you.” “Do you,” said Leonard, “I mean, does you tribe, shake hands?” “No,” said Fighting Prawn. “We kiss on the lips.” “Oh,” said Leonard, looking very alarmed.

You have to be careful on the deck, because of the "hatches," which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates.

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.

SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.

It was you readers who really came through, proving once again that when the American people decide to "get involved" in a problem, it is best not to let them have any sharp implements.

No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.

I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.

Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

I can't recall a story that played out exactly as I'd expected it to. That's one of the thrills of journalism - being surprised, and learning new stuff, but it also poses the biggest challenge to a writer's character.

9 saw the first direct-dialed long-distance telephone call, between New York and San Francisco. Of course, back in that primitive era the parties had to speak to each other manually; today one or both ends of the conversation would be carried on by a machine.

I actually like south Florida. I never lived in a more interesting place than this. I've never met a wider range of people. I guess when I came here I thought there were Cubans and then there were people from New York and that was Miami. Now I know that it's Cubans, people from New York, and some people from New Jersey.

I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrific-ally witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

If God had wanted us to spend all our time fretting about the problems of home ownership, He would never have created beer. This is not to say that I am recommending that you totally ignore your responsibilities as a homeowner and just sit around all day with a can of beer in your hand. No indeed, I have long been a believer in purchasing bottled beer, and pouring it into a chilled glass.

A secret society within a secret society.

There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace.

His body rigid with terror as he waited for the savages to something horrible to him—bash his head with clubs, or stab him with spears, or… …or tap him on the shoulder.

Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.

I've never actually given birth to a child, but I suspect that going to a Justin Bieber concert with a child is close.

To enter Europe, you must have a valid passport with a photograph of yourself in which you look like you are being booked on charges of soliciting sheep.

One day soon the Gillette company will announce the development of a razor that, thanks to a computer microchip, can actually travel ahead in time and shave beard hairs that don't even exist yet

Nobody understands how hard it is, being a captain.

At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that: •The universe is even bigger than they thought! •There are even more subatomic particles than they thought! •Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.

I'm not saying that women don't think about sex also. I'm saying that women are capable, for at least brief periods of time, of not thinking about sex, and that most guys are not.

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.

My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.

Sir,” James asked, “what are we going to do?” “We’re going to look for water,” said Alf. “And food?” said Tubby Ted. “Water first,” said Alf. “We can go days without food.” “We can what?” Tubby Ted shouted.

A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.

The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that 'the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.' I could not have phrased it better myself.

The primary function of the government is - and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution - 'to spew out paper.'

Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.