Andy Rooney by Andy Rooney

Page 77:

There is a kind of glory to a lighted Christmas tree. It can give you the feeling that everything is not low and rotten and dishonest, but that people are good and capable of being elated just at the thought of being alive this year. When I’m looking at a well-decorated Christmas tree, no amount of adverse experience can convince me that people are anything but good. If people were bad, they wouldn’t go to all that trouble to display that much affection for each other and the world they live in.

Andy Rooney by Andy Rooney

Page 45:

I don’t know where we all got the thought that ideas come in a blinding flash or that we can learn how to be struck with creative new ideas. Not many ideas come that way. The best ideas are the result of the same slow, selective, cognitive process that produces the sum of a column of figures. Anyone who waits to be struck with a good idea has a long wait coming. If I have a deadline for a column or a television script, I sit down at the typewriter and damn well decide to have an idea. There’s nothing magical about the process, no flashing lights.

Andy Rooney by Andy Rooney

Page 33:

He says, "I am not interested in being diverted from my own thoughts." He doesn’t like listening to music or going to the Broadway theater, although he has had season tickets to the New York Giants most of his adult life. His genius as a writer is not knowing much about what anyone else says or thinks. It’s knowing exactly what he thinks.