"Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip."

"When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911."

"I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes."

"Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go."

"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."

"I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up."

"Dreams have but one owner at a time. That is why dreamers are lonely."

"I have a hat. It is graceful and feminine and give me a certain dignity, as if I were attending a state funeral or something. Someday I may get up enough courage to wear it, instead of carrying it."

"The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again."

"On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings."

"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."

"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there."

"I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent."

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."

"It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding."

"One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child's name and how old he or she is."

"Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, "A house guest," you're wrong because I have just described my kids."

"I've exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars."

"Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead."

"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago."

"I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ''Checkout Time is 18 years.''"

"God created man, but I could do better."

"Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you."

"There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo."

"Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide."

"Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time."

"Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead."

"There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M."

"Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you."

"For some of us, watching a miniseries that lasts longer than most marriages is not easy."

"I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order."

"Never accept a drink from a urologist."

"In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."

"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery."

"There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it."

"How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?"

"What's with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?"

"All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them."

"Children make your life important."

"In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced in television."

"It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows."

"Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it."

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me"."