Ilf and Petrov

"All talented people write differently, all untalented ones write the same way and even in the same handwriting."

"You need to show him some paper, otherwise he wont believe that you exist."

"In science fiction novels, the main thing was the radio. With it, the happiness of mankind was expected. Now there is a radio, but there is no happiness."

"...She is four years old, but she says she is two. Rare coquetry."

"He got so drunk that he could already perform various minor miracles."

"Liar competition. The first prize was given to the person who told the truth."

"What? Seventy thousand roubles worth of jewellery hidden in a chair! Heaven knows who may sit on that chair!"

"With printing being as well developed as it is in the West, the forgery of Soviet identification papers is nothing. A friend of mine even went as far as forging American dollars. And you know how difficult that is. The paper has those different-coloured little lines on it. It requires great technique. He managed to get rid of them on the Moscow black market, but it turned out later that his grandfather, a notorious currency-dealer, had bought them all in Kiev and gone absolutely broke. The dollars were counterfeit, after all."

"When a woman grows old, many unpleasant things may happen to her: her teeth may fall out, her hair may thin out and turn grey, she may become short-winded, she may unexpectedly develop fat or grow extremely thin, but her voice never changes. It remains just as it was when she was a schoolgirl, a bride, or some young rakes mistress."

"Statistics know everything."

"An attempt to look at New York from a car failed. We were driving along rather dark and gloomy streets. Sometimes something was buzzing like hell under my feet, sometimes something rumbled overhead. When we stopped at traffic lights, the sides of the cars next to us obscured everything. The driver turned around several times and asked for the address. Apparently, he was worried about our English. Sometimes he looked at us encouragingly, and his face said: “Nothing, you won’t get lost! No one has ever lost in New York.”"

"Every small town [in America] wants to be like New York. There are New Yorks for two thousand people, and there are for one thousand eight hundred. We even came across one baby New York with nine hundred inhabitants. And it was a real city. Its residents walked along their own Broadway with their noses in the air. It is a disputable thing whose Broadway they considered the main thing to be, theirs or New Yorks one."