But a funny thing happens to you in a depression. If you don't hurt yourself, you can gain tremendous insights and empathy, find inner strengths and hidden talents. It's a mysterious process, but if you can hold on, you become a wiser person. (101).

I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, I'm getting even.

When we grieve, tears and guilt get mixed together.

There was tremendous pressure to take dialysis, and there were lots of tears when I broke the news to the family that I was not going to do it.

While my friends were discussing Pearl Harbor as the country's problem, I took it personally. It dawned on me that the Japanese attack could be my ticket out of high school.

I don't know whether this is the best of times or the worst of times, but I assure you it's the only time you've got. You can either sit on your expletive deleted or pick a daisy.

People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man does not drive, there is something wrong with him.

Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

As my good friend Al Capp told me a few years ago, the best thing to do with a confirmed hotel reservation slip when you have no room is to spread it out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel and go to sleep on it. You'll either embarrass the hotel into giving you a room or you'll be hauled off to the local jug, where at least you'll have a roof over your head.

So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn't Die. I don't know if this is true or not, but I think some people, not many, are starting to wonder why I'm still around.

I worship the quicksand he Richard Nixon walks in.

Becoming eighty is a matter of life or death. I chose life. It is a much better position to be in, and it's easier on your back.

I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies.

People who live in glass houses have to wash their windows all the time.

Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times, it is only time we have.

I like champagne because it always tastes as though my foot's asleep.