Every morning I take out my bankbook, stare at it, shudder — and turn quickly to my typewriter. - Sydney J. Harris

The personality of man is not an apple that has to be polished, but a banana that has to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling... Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on — the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: We are selling the package, not the product.

The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

Work and play are an artificial pair of opposites, because the best kind of play contains an element of work, and the most productive kind of work must include something of the spirit of play.