1. Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.

2. The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!

3. What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

(So that's why my voice still cracks...)

4. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

5. Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise . . . specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

6. Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

7. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

(What the f-ck is that a$$h0le talking about?)

8. A friend in power is a friend lost.

9. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

(And to think of all the stuff I stole from your houses...)

10. You are what you pretend to be, so you have to be careful what you pretend to be.

11. Rambo isn't violent. I see Rambo as a philanthropist.

(If Rambo is a philathropist, then Hitler must be Santa Claus...)

12. If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

(No one said Einstein was a poet...)

13. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.