Dave Barry Quotes

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

UNIVAC: a device, which contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,500 square feet and weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons.

The books all say that barracuda rarely eat people, but very few barracuda can read.

Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.

Basically Ken is a very gentle, home-loving person. I remember when one of his stick insects had a knee infection. He stayed up all night rubbing it with germoline and banging its head on the table.

First, a few words about this title. It isn't easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also The Bible.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.

To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

At certain times each year, we journalists do almost nothing except apply for the Pulitzers and several dozen other major prizes. During these times you could walk right into most newsrooms and commit a multiple axe murder naked, and it wouldn't get reported in the paper because the reporters and editors would all be too busy filling out prize applications.

We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

Get away from the door." she whispered. "Both of you get out of here NOW." "Miss," said Alf. "We don't mean no..." "You don't know what you're getting into." she said. "You must leave here this instant." Alf, his face worried said to Peter. "Maybe we should..." "No," sad Peter, furious. "We've come this far, and we're going to go in there, and she can't stop us." "Yes I can." said Molly, her voice dead calm. Peter and Alf both looked at her. "I can scream." she said. "You wouldn't." Peter said. "Yes I would." "You don't dare." said Peter. "You're not supposed to be here, either. You'd be in as much trouble as us." "I could say I heard a noise," she said. "I heard something fall." she pointed to the padlcok. "I came to investigate, and when I saw you I screamed." "All right miss. said Alf. "No need for that." he put a hand on Peter's shoulder. "Come on lad." "No," said Peter, shrugging off the hand, glaring at Molly. "You go if you want. She doesn't scare me." "I'm going to count," said Molly. "If you're not gone when I get to ten, I WILL scream." "You're bluffing." said Peter." said Peter. "One." said Molly. On the floor Leatherface stirred, rolling over, resumed snoring. "Little friend." whispered Alf, his tone urgent now. "I'm going." "Go then." said Peter. "Two." "Please little friend." "NO." "Three" "All right, then." said Alf, shaking his head. "Good luck, then." "Four" Alf was up the ladder and gone. "Five" "Why are you doing this?" hissed Peter. "Six. Because I have to

In the kitchen, I turn on a TV set that has hundreds of channels devoted to every conceivable subject including celebrity bunion removal (This week: David Hasselhoff). I tune in to one of the literally dozens of news shows, all of which feature a format of 55 percent celebrities promoting things, 30 percent emails from viewers, and 15 percent YouTube videos showing bears jumping on trampolines. While I'm catching up on these developments, I turn on the programmable coffeemaker, which I hope that someday, perhaps by attending community college, I will learn to program.

It's a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property?

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

The major advantage of domestic travel is that, with a few exceptions such as Miami, most domestic locations are conveniently situated right here in the United States.

The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

Baby's room should be close enough to your room so that you can hear baby cry, unless you want to get some sleep, in which case baby's room should be in Peru.

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government!

I realize that some of you may be skeptical about the idea of reincarnation, but there's a lot of evidence that it's real. Exhibit A is Vice President Al Gore, who obviously, at some point in his previous existence, was a slab of Formica.

HAVE YOU EVER REALLY EMBARRASSED YOURSELF? Don't answer that, stupid. It's a rhetorical question. Of course you've embarrassed yourself. Everybody has. I bet the pope has. If you were to say to the pope: "Your Holy Worshipfulness, I bet you've pulled some blockheaded boners in your day, huh?" he'd smile that warm, knowing, fatherly smile he has, and then he'd wave. He can't hear a word you're saying, up on that balcony.

The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

You would think that, by sheer chance, there would come a time when you daughter's two dances would be close together, ideally near the beginning. But the dance studio makes sure this never happens, using the same computer scheduling program that the cable-TV company uses to make sure that the technician, for whom you have been waiting eleven hours, rings your doorbell only when you have just commenced pooping.

But when you take over a ship with a bomb threat, you really go first-class.

Every single human cell contains "DNA," which is a special molecule that your body leaves behind at crime scenes so the police can identify you.

RAM: This gives guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest memory. That's important, because the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages.

I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with airline procedures, I could stand around.

I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.

My problem with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible.

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.

A small deer came into my camp and stole my bag of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed? Please call.

John Dorschner, one of our staff writers here at Tropic magazine at The Miami Herald, who is a good friend of mine and an excellent journalist, but a raving liberal, wrote a story about a group that periodically pops up saying that they're going to start their own country or start their own planet or go back to their original planet, or whatever. They were going to "create a libertarian society" on a floating platform in the Caribbean somewhere. I know there's never going to be a country on a floating anything, but if they want to talk about it, that's great.

It was you readers who really came through, proving once again that when the American people decide to "get involved" in a problem, it is best not to let them have any sharp implements.

The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service.

Long, long ago, before eruptions were invented, the molten lava had to be carried down the mountainside, bucket by bucket, and poured over the sleeping villagers. This took time.

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.

I always wanted to write when I was a kid; it just never occurred to me that you could have a job that didn't involve any actual work ... I felt it would be fun to have a job like that where you could make stuff up and be irresponsible and get paid for it.

Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricty goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires.

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

Talking about golf is always boring. Playing golf can be interesting, but not the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive the cart.

Almost half of the people over 40 believe they look younger than they are. This says something important about older Americans. We have terrible eyesight.

Horkman made a sound like a bullfrog trying to give a blow job to a buffalo.

Another important rule of affair-having: Never be discreet at the office.

Molly, at the rail, her wet hair matted down, her dress torn, watching Peter intently until she knew he saw her, then mouthing something ... Fly, she was saying, Fly.
"I CAN'T," Peter shouted moving his arms helplessly. "I CAN'T, MOLLY!

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone.

There is nothing as relaxing as being out on the open sea, listening to the waves and the wind and the sails and voices downstairs yelling "HOW DO YOU FLUSH THESE TOILETS?"

I wrote about why I didn't think libertarians are really doing this kind of thing so that they can have sex with dogs. I discussed some of the reasons that a person might want to live out of the control of our federal, state, local, and every other form of government. Actually, I don't think I even called myself a libertarian . I think Tom Shroder identified me as one.

Head Smashed In, may I help you?

People don't think of writers as sex objects. The women who write to me and suggest that we ought to have sex usually turn out to be, like, eighty. And their letters always end with, "Just joking."

Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals, drawing perfect verticals, drawing really spastic diagonals, trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside.

When your Super Bowl guests arrive, they should find a mound of potato chips large enough to conceal a pony sitting in front of the television. For nutritional balance, you should also put out a bowl of carrot sticks. If you have no carrot sticks, you can use pinecones, or used electrical fuses, because nobody will eat them anyway. This is no time for nutritional balance: This is the Super Bowl, for God's sake.

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.

If you answered, 'Spin the Bottle,' then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood.

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.

But that's kind of an easy stance to be if you're a humor columnist, because you're tending to make fun of the government and the powerful. I'm sort of a soft-core libertarian in that my compass is generally pointing away from 'Let's let the government do this' Does it matter to me that it's Democrats who think we need more elaborate programs that involve shifting money from one group to another group or it's Republicans saying we need to take a harder look at what kinds of things people are watching on cable TV? Neither one of those things strikes me as a good idea.

I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.

I am not a violent person. I am a product of the Flower Power '60s. I have actually worn bell-bottomed jeans.

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.

I don't have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it's stupid - which is the one perspective that's almost completely lacking in Washington.

If it weren't for marriage, men and women would have to fight with total strangers.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

Been in a lot of time zones. Been on a lot of planes. Had a lot of complimentary honey-roasted peanuts whapped onto my tray table by hostile flight attendants. "Would you care for some peanuts, sir?" WHAP. Like that. The flight attendants hate us passengers, because we're surly to them because our flight is delayed. Our flight is always delayed. The Russians will never be able to get their missiles through the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.

Orangutan are very weird animals but they look very soulful.

There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: passive systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and active systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too.

the world's biggest

Normal person's weekly chore list: 1. clean kitchen. 2. clean bathroom. 3. clean entire rest of domicile. cleaning impaired person's weekly chore list: 1. don't get peanut butter on sheets.

She goes to Frederick's of Hollywood at the mall and purchases an explicit lingerie outfit so sheer that you could read an appliance warranty through it in an unlit closet.

The hardest thing about being a guy is that women don't accept that you really are just a simple, pathetic, labrador retriever-like creature. That we live in a world were women actually expect you to think thoughtful thoughts, and have real emotions, which we don't have. Having to try to live up to the imaginary ideal that women have of what men are, instead of just being what you are, which is just a pathetic creature, but still.

Some archeologists believe that Stonehenge - the mysterious arrangement of enormous elongated stones in England - is actually a crude effort by the Druids to build a computing device.

What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be "colonial".

The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

I grew up in the Southwest Bronx. Father an accountant, mother a schoolteacher. Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying.

If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.

That is the Wasp, yes. But it was captured by Black Stache, and he's coming for this ship now."
"And how do you know that?" asked Slank. "Did a seagull tell you?" This brought chuckles from the crew.
Something like that, thought Peter.

The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

Alf pondered his next move. On the one hand, the savages seemed to be responding reasonably well to "How." On the other hand they really weren't making much progress.
At least they're not eating us, he thought.
Ten seconds went by, then twenty, as Alf looked at the older savage, and the older savage looked at Alf. Finally, out of sheer nervousness, and unable to think of what else to do, Alf raised his right hand again. But this time, just as Alf began to speak, the savage rotated his spear from the vertical to the horizontal, pointing it toward Alf's chest. Alf stopped in mid "How," staring at the sharp pink spear tip, inches from his heart.
And the savage spoke.
Poking his spear tip against Alf's chest, he said: "Can we move this conversation along, old chap? I'm getting frightfully tired of "How.

I like golf because you can be really terrible at it, and still not look much dorkier than anybody else.

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. 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 meals.

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.

Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

I don't like anything unsigned in a newspaper that purports to be the opinion of some group if we don't know who the group is. It's laughable to say that The Miami Herald's editorials or any newspaper's editorials represent any views other than those of the people writing them, so why don't we tell everybody who they are?

We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants - that needs - to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for "transfusion," and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to French-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

I have always dressed according to certain Basic Guy Fashion Rules,including: Both of your socks should always be the same color, Or they should at least both be fairly dark.

In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger.

The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812.

You don't have to think really hard to get the joke. I think humor in general appeals to all people.

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able - even against a weak opponent, such as my younger brothers or the dog - to get myself checkmated in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with new covers pasted on.

Nobody understands how hard it is, being a captain.

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene ...

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'

Many people have trouble sticking to their resolutions, and there is a simple scientific explanation for this. In 1987, a team of psychologists conducted a study in which they monitored the New Year's resolutions of 275 people. After one week the psychologists found that 92 percent of the people were keeping their resolutions; after two weeks we have no idea what happened because the psychologists had quit monitoring.

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 think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer.

'I'm sorry,' guys are always telling women, 'but I'm just not ready to make a commitment.' Guys are in a permanent state of nonreadiness. If guys were turkey breasts, you could put them in a 350-degree oven on July Fourth, and they still wouldn't be done in time for Thanksgiving.