Bill Vaughan

An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

From the day I arrived, California seemed like an enchanted land.

Common sense needs to be more common.

Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.

Most choices are driven by immediate results.

Success means different things in different parts of my life, but overall if I have to define ultimately what success means – the bottom line – then for me it’s if the family is healthy and happy.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know — the less you know, the more you think you know.

Listen to the birds and don’t hate nobody.

I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods.

All heiresses are beautiful.