Andy Rooney Quotes - Page 8

Numbers are the most certain things we have.

No one likes the house next door to look worse or a lot better than his own.

It is possible to be dumb and be a college president.

Computers may save time but they sure waste a lot of paper. About 98 percent of everything printed out by a computer is garbage that no one ever reads.

Flying is always an unpleasant experience. You wait an hour for every ten minutes you actually spend getting anywhere.

I like ice hockey, but it's a frustrating game to watch. It's hard to keep your eyes on both the puck and the players and too much time passes between scoring in hockey. There are usually more fights than there are points.

We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones.

When there are starving people in the world, it seems wrong that so many of us Americans eat as much for entertainment as for nourishment.

My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you're a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea. That's the way to get an idea.

Not many people in this world are as lucky as I've been. ... All this time I've been paid to say what is on my mind on television. You don't get any luckier in life than that.

Did you ever notice that people who are good with a computer don't use it for much of anything except being good with a computer? They know all about information technology, but they don't have much interest in the information. I'm the opposite.

One day about 10 years ago the door to my office opened and who walked in but Bill Gates.... Seemed like a nice guy and has done more with his money than most billionaires. But that's as far as I want to go being kind to Bill Gates.

I am interested in details. If you go into anything far enough, you get into the details of it, and people turn out to be interested in what makes things work.

Taxes are important. President Bush's tax proposals leave no rich person behind. Voters approve of President Bush helping the kind of people they wish they were one of.

Writers don't often say anything that readers don't already know, unless its a news story. A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.

We've sent a man to the moon and that's 29,000 miles away. The center of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away. You could drive that in a week but for some reason nobody's ever done it.

Before a kid learns how to use a computer that can solve mathematical problems, he or she should know how to do arithmetic without a computer.

I never understood retirement. What is the attraction of retirement? I go down there to Florida and look around and I said, my God, who wants this? Not me.

I spent my first 50 years trying to become known as a writer and the next 30 trying to avoid being famous. I walk down the street or go to a football game and people shout, 'Hey Andy'. I hate that.

Space, like Switzerland, should be neutral.

I often pass a farm with cows grazing in the field and I think to myself how terrible it is that human beings grow other animals just to kill them and eat them. Most of us think of vegetarians as nuts and I'm not a vegetarian but I wouldn't be surprised if we came to a time in 50 or 100 years when civilized people everywhere refused to eat animals.

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

I like Valentine's Day. The trouble is the florists and the candy-makers and the card people are all advertising so much, you don't dare let the day go by without making an offering, whether you mean it or not. Money exceeds affection.

People waiting for an elevator don't know what to do, standing with strangers. There is nothing to do. Its an uneasy time. Some press the button repeatedly as though it would help.