Garner's Quotations

by Dwight Garner

—Joke in Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters

  The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

  —Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

  I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels … or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura

  He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.

  —Henry Miller, Black Spring

  If I need any shit from you, I’ll squeeze your head.

  —Kris Kristofferson, to Jon Peters

  What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

  —Diane Johnson, Natural Opium

  That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain.

  —Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

  Saigon. Shit.

  —Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now

  I was ready to infiltrate Hanoi, grab Uncle Ho by the goatee, pull off his face, and make a clean escape.

  —Thom Jones, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine

  STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE.

  —Robert Benchley, telegram from Venice

  Fuck them for getting to live in a place like this.

  —Garth Greenwell, on Venice, Cleanness

  That profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine.

  —Seymour Krim, on his memory, Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

  Closing the bodega down for real.

  —Cy Twombly, on death, in Sally Mann’s Hold Still

  Disintegration—I’m taking it in stride.

  —Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

  I am so half an orange without you.

  —Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

  They are very nice to eat, oranges, when you’ve been having sex for ages. They cut through the fug and smell very organised.

  —Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

  —Mother, how many pips in a tangerine?

  —Shut up, you little bastard.

  —Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters

  Is there a nemesis in the house?

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

  —William S. Burroughs

  —There are so few areas of transcendence left.

  —Don’t forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others.

  —Robert Jay Lifton and Christopher Hitchens

  People seldom read a book which is given to them.

  —Samuel Johnson

  I turned another page in the book although I hadn’t read the previous one.

  —Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

  A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has never seen the ocean.

  —Walter Bagehot

  Life is slow suicide, unless you read.

  —Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

  Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

  —W. H. Auden

  There are no nineteenth century ballads about being gay.

  —Colm Tóibín

  Relax, Amy, I’m not gay … I just like Sleater-Kinney.

  —Emily Gould, Friendship

  Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t make me any less American than Jesse Helms.

  —Allen Ginsberg

  You can’t work in a haberdashery in the sticks without knowing what a fairy is.

  —Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume One

  I once started out

  to walk around the world

  but ended up in Brooklyn.

  That Bridge was just too much for me.

  —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

  Is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?

  —Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude

  What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?

  —Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

  Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical and nude?

  —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

  Your gross body my favorite song.

  —Danez Smith, “Acknowledgments”

  The naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one.

  —Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

  You were naked. I’m a sucker for the first person singular.

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  Man, there she stood without her anthropology on!

  —Ralph Ellison, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison

  More of this sitting around like beasts!

  —W. H. Auden

  I have a lifelong horror of sandy beaches.

  —Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory

  —You know what people who go to nude beaches look like?

  —Tell me.

  —People who shouldn’t go to nude beaches.

  —Elmore Leonard, Be Cool

  Who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?

  —Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn

  Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, journals

  Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

  —H. L. Mencken

  Bones heal, pain is temporary and chicks dig scars.

  —Evel Knievel, attributed

  I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.

  —J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

  Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

  White people eat cheese for breakfast and smell of it all day.

  —Aravind Adiga, Selection Day

  Fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores, and, and molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains.

  —Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

  No wine, she said. It leads to cheese.

  —Lorrie Moore, Bark

  Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

  —H. L. Mencken

  The old ultra-violence.

  —Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

  Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

  —Tom Waits

  Things mount up inside one, and then one has to perpetrate an outrage.

  —Muriel Spark, Robinson

  Don’t confuse honors with achievement.

  —Zadie Smith

  Literature has nothing to do with national prizes and everything to do with a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

  —Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

  Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

  —Jean Cocteau, attributed

  Prizes are for parents so they’ll know.

  —Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

  Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

  —Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From

  If you’re ever angry enough to hit somebody, don’t do it. Cool down and get yourself a pistol.

  —Elmore Leonard, Maximum Bob

  You know, there’s a distinct lack of female arms dealers, I’ve always thought.

  —Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

  Guns … were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound.

  —Lorrie Moore, Like Life

  I am a bullet, being shot out of a dirty gun.


  —Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

  She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

  —Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

  The vote … means nothing to women, we should be armed.

  —Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls

  Every woman should have a blowtorch.

  —Julia Child, attributed

  Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba.

  —John Ruskin

  As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast.

  —Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  I think women admire Marlene Dietrich so much because she looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast.

  —Angela Carter

  Come out, my eight-slice beauty.

  —Ann Beattie, on a toaster given as a Christmas gift, The Burning House

  Mother doesn’t cook, Ignatius said dogmatically. She burns.

  —John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

  Her favourite food is anything burnt.

  —Ali Smith, Spring

  Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.

  —Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

  You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.

  —Paul Beatty, The Sellout

  God created black people and black people created style.

  —George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum

  I’m as American as apple pie. But no. I cannot, simply cannot, don a mask and suck the c— of that sweet, secure bitch, middle-class American life.

  —Charles Wright, The Messenger

  Just one hog ass thing after the other.

  —Albert Murray, on being black, The Omni-Americans

  He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  In victory you deserve champagne. In defeat you need it.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte, attributed

  Twit twit twit

  Jug jug jug jug jug jug.

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it.

  —Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage

  A well-minxed martini.

  —Kevin Young, “The Suspects”

  No martini, no lecture.

  —Dean Acheson, warning to the Brookings Institution

  A young girl’s voice. She is dressed in a nun’s habit. The boy turns and faces her. She proffers a chalice of cervical exudate and he drinks from it.

  —Nick Tosches, start of a review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, in Rolling Stone

  Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.

  —Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

  Oh, man, this is wyrd.

  —N. Scott Momaday, “Death Comes for Beowulf”

  The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

  —Wendell Berry

  There’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough.

  —Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

  Canadians. Grrr!

  —Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper

  Canadians, do not vomit on me!

  —Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

  I dreamed that I threw up a fox.

  —Joy Williams, “The Visiting Privilege”

  Puking overboard to feed the herrings.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  —Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?

  —No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.

  —Art Spiegelman, interview about Maus

  There is no more beautiful a sight, he said, than to see a fine woman bashing away at a typewriter.

  —Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye

  Teabags, Tampax and the TLS.

  —Angela Carter’s description of Lorna Sage’s house

  She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for a dandy a century ago.

  —Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.

  —Charlotte Brontë

  Just because I’m so wretchedly plain doesn’t mean I can do without things.

  —William Trevor, “Flights of Fancy”

  Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

  —Katharine Hepburn, attributed

  Why was “plain” a euphemism for “ugly”?

  —Elif Batuman, The Idiot

  You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.

  —Anthony Trollope, The Warden

  I may look like a beer salesman, but I’m a poet.

  —Theodore Roethke

  Any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can be expected to be called a rat about three times a year.

  —Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

  The January issue is suddenly so full of people with bald heads, I had to kill three of them today.

  —Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries

  Head shaved clean as a porn star’s testicle.

  —Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

  You must not mind me, madam; I say strange things, but I mean no harm.

  —Samuel Johnson

  If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you.

  —Rita Dove, “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved”

  —I’ve got an FFF inside.

  —What’s that, sir?

  —A fucking funny feeling.

  —Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

  That’s what being alive’s all about, all those fucked up feelings. You’ve got to have them; when you stop, watch out.

  —Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

  Forgetting that one should never answer the telephone in a dream, I take a call.

  —Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

  Who hasn’t woken up screaming in a four-poster elephant herd?

  —Paul Muldoon, “The Side Project”

  Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.

  —Anna Kavan, Ice

  A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.

  —Toni Morrison, Love

  If you’re sad or heartbroken, make yourself up, dress up, add more lipstick and attack.

  —Coco Chanel, attributed

  He did secretly pine for an extra dictionary “label”: namely, illit., to go with colloq. and derog. and the rest.

  —Martin Amis, on Kingsley Amis, The Rub of Time

  This erratum slip has been inserted by mistake.

  —Alasdair Gray, Unlikely Stories, Mostly

  Don’t cite dictionaries to me … Dictionary people consult me, not I them.

  —John O’Hara

  Folks don’t necessarily have to be able to use all them big dictionary words to understand life.

  —Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

  He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary.

  —William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway

  Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

  —Ernest Hemingway, on William Faulkner

  There ain’t a woman in the world who ain’t a fool for a talking bit.

  —Record producer Billy Sherrill, to Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

  Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

  When Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s, it sounded as if his teeth had been ground down to points.

  —Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

  Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and
grinders.

  —Walter Bagehot

  All my clothes had holes in them from where the sensors had been attached.

  —Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

  A hole in your sock may have just occurred; not so with a darn.

  —Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters

  Wind, rain, work, and mockery were his tailors.

  —Walker Evans, on James Agee

  —Lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.

  —Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.

  —P. G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”

  Fashion is about long black cars when you need them.

  —Liz Tilberis

  What I like about limousines is that they have tinted windows, so no-one can see if you’re snogging in the back seat.

  —Elizabeth Jane Howard

  The Trojans never did any harm to me.

  —Achilles, in Homer’s The Iliad

  I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

  —Muhammad Ali

  I would give all my profound Greek to dance really well.

  —Virginia Woolf

  God match me with a good dancer!

  —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

  Verily thou shakest a wicked ankle.

  —Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

  What man would not be a dancer if he could.

  —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

  I have actually been written up in columns as “the best dancer among the literati.”

  —John O’Hara, Selected Letters of John O’Hara

  The body says what words cannot.

  —Martha Graham

  I’m so afraid she’s going to give birth to a cube on stage.

  —Stark Young, on Martha Graham

  Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  He who fusses about a mosquito net can never hope to dance with a goat.

  —Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party

  I will gnat sleep in that room again.

  —Elizabeth Barrett, diary

  —I get out of bed and throw up and take a shower and shave and have breakfast.

  —You throw up every morning?

  —Of course, doesn’t everyone?

  —E. J. Kahn, in conversation with a surprised Brendan Gill

  The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

  Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

  —Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

  The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.

  —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

  He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.