A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it’s not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It’s more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

As you heat the planet up, it’s just like boiling a pot.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

One word from the Lord is like a piece of gold to a believer, who is like a jeweler, shaping and hammering out the promise for a number of weeks.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation – or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays – is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.