Sublime

Apparently this is a misquote of what Einstein actually said, which was “Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” But years ago a student relayed this to me in the form above and, no offense to Einstein, I thought my student’s version was brilliant and have been using it e

You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.

Goat is the funniest word in that paragraph, because it is the most unexpected of all the words. It’s the biggest surprise. Therefore it must be said last. It is the ball that I use to knock down my tower of milk cans. Can you see the tower I built before getting there?

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?

And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I me

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words

If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously.

'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—: " 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "

An excellent joke I heard at last night’s signing: It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail. “Yes,” it says. “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Furious at being disturbed, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he