“Analyzing humor is like disecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”

“Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.”

“So I told [the doctor] about my hay fever, which used to rage just in summertime but now simmers the year round, and he listened listlessly as though it were a cock and bull story; and we sat there for a few minutes and neither of us was interested in the other's nose, but after a while he poked a little swab up mine and made a smear on a glass slide and his assistant put it under the microscope and found two cells which delighted him and electrified the whole office, the cells being characteristic of a highly allergic system. The doctor's manner changed instantly and he was full of the enthusiasm of discovery and was as proud of the two little cells as though they were his own.”

“When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.”

“After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.”

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.”