As 2015 begins, here are some famous people’s New Year’s resolutions and advice.

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.

“Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.

“Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time.

“However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”
– Mark Twain

“The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.”
– P.J. O’Rourke

“Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
– Bill Vaughn

“The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”
– W.H. Auden

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
– Mark Twain

“New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.”
– Charles Lamb

“He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; He who makes one is a fool.”
– F.M. Knowles

“I do think New Year’s resolutions can’t technically be expected to begin on New Year’s Day, don’t you? Since, because it’s an extension of New Year’s Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system.

“Also dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.”
– Helen Fielding

“The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!”
– Edward Payson Powell

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
– Edith Lovejoy Pierce

“New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.”
– James Agate

“Good resolutions are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
– Oscar Wilde

“People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.”
– Author Unknown

“A new oath holds pretty well; but… when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it.”
– Mark Twain