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" I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. "

Tom Lehrer

Writing

Night

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" Bad weather always looks worse through a window. "

" I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it. "

" If a person feels he can't communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it. "

Tom Lehrer

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" Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it. "

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" I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up. "

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" Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? "

" Eddie Izzard is wonderful, I think, but I've only seen that one HBO special he did. He's one of the few people who talk about stuff other than girlfriends and relationships and flatulence and genitalia. There are very few of them who actually talk about real stuff. "

" I loved high school, but I wouldn't want to do it again. "

" When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.' "

" I wasn't really a performer by temperament. "

" Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh. "

" The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines. "

" I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math. "

" I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that! "

Tom Lehrer

Hate

Know

" There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections. "

" San Francisco is a city of twenty-something millionaire white kids named Doug. "

" One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. "

" When you're in a public profession like I was, and you stop doing it like I did, people think you're either crazy or dead. "

" When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex. "

" Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. "

" I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up. "

" I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first. "

" It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year. "

" I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up. "

" Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs. "

" If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or, perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while. "

" Irreverence is easy - what's hard is wit. "

" Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. "

" Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you. "

" The Army has carried the American ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. "