These are among my favorites from Steven Wright’s observations:

1. You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

2. I was once walking through the forest alone, and a tree fell right in front of me—and I didn’t hear it.

3. One time, the police stopped me for speeding, and they said, “Don’t you know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?” I said, “Yeah, I know, but I wasn’t gonna be out that long.”

4. For my birthday, I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier… put ’em in the same room. Let ’em fight it out.

5. Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time.

6. I’m planning a trip to Spain. So I bought an album that teaches you the language. Put the album on, you put headphones on, you learn the language while you’re sleeping. During the night, the record skipped. I get up the next day, I could only stutter in Spanish.

7. One night, I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

8. I broke a mirror in my house. I’m supposed to get seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

9. I like to reminisce with people I don’t know. Granted, it takes longer.

10. I like to fill my tub up with water, then turn the shower on and act like I’m in a submarine that’s been hit.

11. You know when you’re sitting on a chair, and you lean back so you’re just on two legs, and then you lean too far and you almost fall over, but just at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.

12. I have map of the United States, it’s actual size. It says one mile=one mile.

13. I got up the other day and everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.

14. I’ve been doing a lot of painting lately. Abstract painting—extremely abstract. No brush, no canvas. I just think about it.

15. One time I went to a museum where all the work was done by children. They had all the paintings up on refrigerators.

16. I like my dental hygienist. I think she’s very pretty. So whenever I go to have my teeth cleaned, while I’m in the waiting room I eat an entire box of Oreo cookies.

17. The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.

18. I went into a place to eat, it said “breakfast anytime.” So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.

19. How do you know when the invisible ink runs out?

20. I have two very rare photographs. One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car. The other one is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child.

21. The Stones—I love the Stones. I can’t believe they’re still doing it after all these years. I watch ’em whenever I can. Fred, Barney…

22. Friday I was in a bookstore. I started talking to this very French-looking girl. She was a bilingual illiterate—she couldn’t read in two different languages.

23. The great thing about being a hermit is that there’s no peer pressure.

24. For a while I lived in Vermont with a guy named Winny. We lived in a house that ran on static electricity. If we wanted to cook something, we had to take a sweater off real quick. If we wanted to run a blender, we had to rub balloons on our head.

25. The ice cream truck in my neighborhood plays “Helter Skelter.”

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