About Leo Rosten: Leo Calvin Rosten was an American humorist in the fields of scriptwriting, storywriting, journalism and Yiddish lexicography.
I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
We see things as we are, not as they are.
Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
If you are going to do something wrong at least enjoy it.
Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.
First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
Extremists think 'communication' means agreeing with them.
