Quotes from Dave Barry

Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

WILLIAMS: The phrase, of course, is a variation of a line from the song MacArthur Park. Any idea why the terrorists picked that particular song, Elizabeth? BURGER: Brian, one theory is that it was chosen specifically to demoralize the United States, because it gets stuck in your head and everybody hates it.

The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of... The federal government. This is like saying that if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos.

Molly squeaked and clicked (the clicks were the hardest) something back, which she hoped was "Hello." What she actually said was "My teeth are green," but the porpoise was too polite to point that out.

I don't have much of a life now, and from what I'm told I'll have even less where I'm going. If there's something wonderful on this ship, I want to know what it is. This is my only chance." -Peter

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

I'm not saying all the women were hot. Some of them, if they fell overboard, they'd be harpooned by Japs.

Our original idea was to write a book titled Fifty Shades of the Hunger Games, by J.K. Rowling with Stephen King: A John Grisham Novel.

By the 1800s, animal sacrifice had been largely discredited as a medical procedure; today it is rarely used outside of Miami.

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying: 'Dave, you have painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the American health-care system. Not all patients wind up being as wretched as Mary! Many of them wind up being dead'.

Shall we go to Bethlehem, men? Or shall we DANCE

Surgery, clamps, sutures, bandages, antibiotics Mop Sucking chest wound Anesthesia, surgery Cork Cancer Chemotherapy, radiation, surgery Casket wreath* 13 Diabetes Insulin Leeches* 14 Hatchet embedded in skull Removal of hatchet, treatment of wound Larger hat Eyes gouged out in hospital by psychopath posing as nurse Prosthetic eyeballs, therapy Six-pack Source:

Some years ago I proposed a new tourism-promotion slogan for Miami. I even had a bumper sticker made. It said: 'Come back to Miami! We Weren't Shooting at YOU'.

Remember this: however bad you think things are today, however awful you consider our leaders to be, however stupid you think your fellow Americans are, this country has seen worse times, including - to name a few - the Civil War, 9/11, the Great Depression, and six seasons of Jersey Shore . We muddled through those times. We will muddle through these.

Most travel experts recommend that even if your final destination is Miami, it's better to fly to an airport in some other city - if necessary, Seattle - and take a cab from there. Or, as Savvy Air Traveler magazine suggests, 'simply jump out of the plane while it's still over the Atlantic'.

New houses, which are crap, because they don't build them the way they used to anymore. Old houses, which used to be good, because they were built back when they built them the way they used to, but which today, as a result of being old, are crap. So whichever kind of house you own, it's going to be some variety of crap, which means sooner or later everything in it will break. Dealing with broken things is the essence of home ownership, and it's exhausting.

I live in Miami, which can be a dangerous place, with a segment of the population capable of horrific acts of violence. And those are the police. The criminals are even worse.

They looked plainly scared, except for one, a wiry boy with bright orange hair—not the largest of the lot, but the one who seemed to be in charge. He had an air about him, Alf thought, the look of a boy who doesn't miss much.

If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meal. Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner toll you could kill a musk ox with.

Other useful commands to teach your dog are 'stay,' 'heel,' 'remove your snout from that person's groin,' 'stop humping the Barcalounger,' 'do not bark violently for two hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,' ' do not eat poop,' and 'if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward'.

Molly and Teacher eyed each other in the manner of two young women who will never, ever, be great friends.

She had large, wide-set green eyes, and long brown hair that curled slightly and turned to gold at the tips. She wore a long, straight blue dress that accentuated the slimness of her frame. She was perhaps an inch taller than Peter, and by the look of her she took baths.

You can put suspenders on a salamander, but it still won't make waffles. See what I mean? That sentence makes absolutely no sense, but I got paid to write it. It's printed right here in a published book!

33 percent agreeing with the statement that the world is controlled by a giant invisible telepathic clam named Ronaldo.