Quotes from Gene Weingarten

I don't hold doors for women. I'm not sure I really differentiate between men and women, in my door-related activities. Do women really care about this issue?

I believe men's faces come in two kinds: Faces that need a blade, and faces that need an electric. I never was happy with an electric. I became pizzaneck.

I don't see a point in advertising my marital status when men don't. Completely ridiculous.

Donald Trump's humor is hostile to a fault.

For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a 'massage parlor' that advertised in 'The Washington Post.'

Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.

The whole point of corporate mascots is to be distinctive. No one in his right mind would ever confuse the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese.

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

Life entails risk, and you have to draw some lines.

Politics is how you think about life itself.

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which you realize that you are trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel at this knowledge.

Let's put to rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos. The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm.

We are all serving time on death row; only the length of our stay is indeterminate. Dead people, walking. If our lives are to be fulfilling, we must be grateful for the experience alone.

Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all. By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it and blunting its power to disturb.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Life is essentially a fatal disease of indeterminate duration.

I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.

Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.

When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.

I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known.

First, in a love song, or any song for that matter, using a plastic word like "inhibitions" is just completely without feel or texture. It demonstrates a tin ear for communication.