Garner's Quotations

by Dwight Garner

  I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

  —William F. Buckley, Jr., Rumbles Left and Right

  To teach chemistry or psychology or even history or Greek a man must actually know something, but for English nothing seems to be necessary beyond a crude capacity to read and write.

  —H. L. Mencken, in The American Mercury

  Me, fail English? That’s unpossible.

  —Ralph Wiggum, on The Simpsons

  However hard you may try, there is never much to say about a henhouse.

  —Jose Saramago

  The chicken tasted to Flora like distributive injustice personified.

  —Nell Zink, Doxology

  Chubby Checker’s chicken-plucker’s voice carried distinctly across the crevasse of sub-arctic night.

  —John Updike, Bech: A Book

  And wouldn’t you know he’d be a singing man.

  —Toni Morrison, Beloved

  Oh, you mean the jingle-man!

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Edgar Allan Poe

  Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

  —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  It is time to strangle several bad poets.

  —Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air”

  Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  Higher Schlock

  —Greil Marcus, on Leonard Cohen, Mystery Train

  Looking like I’d spent the last seventy-two hours bobbing for apples in a vat of Gold Medal flour.

  —Richard Price, on filing a story late

  The things you can do in that men’s room of theirs!

  —Aravind Adiga, on the Union Square Grill bathroom, Selection Day

  His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.

  —Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

  I generally based appraisals of my affections on the momentary condition of my genitalia.

  —Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper

  Whatever chemical change desire is had taken hold.

  —Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

  It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.

  —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

  Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

  —William Faulkner

  Like two moist cream cheeses.

  —Edmund Wilson, on feet, I Thought of Daisy

  A gruyere like a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood.

  —Émile Zola, The Belly of Paris

  Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  Ah, Wensleydale! The Mozart of cheeses!

  —T. S. Eliot

  One of the basic rules of Esquire was, if you’re going to write about a bear, bring on the bear.

  —Byron Dobell, Esquire editor

  I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.

  —Umberto Eco, to the editor of the TLS, after being heavily edited

  Death itself is a maw, with, sometimes, a wiggling uvula.

  —Charles Foster, Being a Beast

  The jackal rips out the hare’s bowels, but the world rolls on.

  —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

  The first thing to know about ground round steak is that it should not be that at all.

  —M.F.K. Fisher

  A good hamburger should taste like the sound of “Under the Boardwalk.”

  —Keith Floyd

  Eating out a radio.

  —Michael Dickman, “Lakes Rivers Streams”

  Why was a radio sinful? Lord knows. But it was.

  So I had one.

  —Reed Whittemore, “The Radio Under the Bed”

  In Excelsis Diode.

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  No one of character would make love by it.

  —Norman Mailer, on L.A. pop radio, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”

  Nuts to the radio.

  —Harold Ross, Letters from the Editor

  It’s funny, isn’t it? A shop selling guns, like as if they were carrots and turnips.

  —Beryl Bainbridge, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

  The .38 Special which rode under his left armpit like a tumor.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  Guns make me thirsty.

  —Chelsey Minnis, “Showdown”

  Like a cherry bomb exploding in me.

  —Andy Warhol, on being shot by Valerie Solanas

  I’m a real lousy hunter … The deer are probably relieved when they smell me and know it’s me.

  —Larry Brown, On Fire

  Don’t wait to be hunted to hide.

  —Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.

  —Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

  I find failure endearing, don’t you?

  —Max Beerbohm

  There’s … a certain kind of excitement in disgrace.

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  Who wouldn’t want to go down in flames?

  —John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

  There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

  —Andrew Sean Greer, Less

  There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It’s a club, it’s the old school, it’s Skull and Bones.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  Nothing amplifies failure like the hug of a stranger.

  —Myla Goldberg, Bee Season

  What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  There’s lots of things you never get, Judge, if you wait till you are asked … That is why I am not a gentleman, Judge.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  No nice men are good at getting taxis.

  —Katharine Whitehorn

  I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.

  —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

  I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life.

  —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

  Whither thou goest, I will definitely go.

  —Fran Ross, Oreo

  Something fell off the shelf inside her.

  —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

  We want you to know that we love you madly.

  —Duke Ellington, to a London audience, with bland mockery

  —Did you win? he asks.

  —It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.

  —Claudia Rankine, Citizen

  I looked at the phone as if it had been a rattlesnake.

  —Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

  Men are so wedded to their gadgets … It belittles them … It takes away all their authority … A man ought to give the impression that he’s alone.

  —Yasmina Reza, God of Carnage

  Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you.

  —Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

  How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

  —James Wolcott, in Vanity Fair

  She was busted, broke and flat

  Had to sell that pussycat.

  —Gillian Welch, “The Way It Goes”

  One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table.

  —Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  When the cigarette burns out, time’s up.

  —Jodie Foster, in Taxi Driver
, on sleeping with a john

  To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.

  —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

  Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.

  —Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings

  What do I know of man’s destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

  —Samuel Beckett, “Enough”

  My inner life tends to be measured out in radishes, meat and limes.

  —Jonathan Gold

  I beg your parsnips.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  My life like an old turnip: several places at once going bad.

  —Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

  A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

  —Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson

  A wise old chef once told me: Wait till peas are in season, then use frozen.

  —Fergus Henderson

  Is a pea cut in half one wounded thing or two?

  —Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites

  Until they take away my hot dog.

  —Seymour Krim, on how long he will keep getting by in literary New York, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business”

  Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

  —Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave

  Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she’d clogged with salted peanuts and called a late lunch.

  —Daniel Woodrell, Muscle for the Wing

  Like a jar of peanut butter waiting for a thumb.

  —Elizabeth Hardwick, on the young women in a Marge Piercy novel

  How difficult are our fellow men to digest!

  —Frederick Nietzsche, The Joyous Science

  The sound of Bob Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did.

  —Robert Ray, in Greil Marcus’s The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs

  The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.

  —David Byrne

  Whiskey and smoke took all the high notes, now all I can sing is the blues.

  —Jerry Lee Lewis, attributed

  I sing in five or six different voices.

  —Axl Rose

  The most important of the voices, though, is Devil Woman.

  —John Jeremiah Sullivan, on Axl Rose, Pulphead

  Those who have a very loud voice are almost incapable of thinking about subtle things.

  —Frederick Nietzsche, The Joyous Science

  One is prepared for friendship, not for friends.

  —Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

  Nearly anyone I’ve found worth knowing was difficult enough, vivid enough, to qualify at some point as my crazy friend.

  —Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence

  The chances are that if you aren’t “difficult” no one will write a book about you.

  —Mary-Kay Wilmers, Human Relations and Other Difficulties

  Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.

  —Robert Bloch

  New York, killer of poets, do you remember the day you passed me through your lower intestine?

  —Karl Shapiro, in Partisan Review

  Sometimes I feel as if I’m being strangled by the sophisticated scum of New York.

  —Charles Wright, The Messenger

  I’m now making myself as scummy as I can.

  —Arthur Rimbaud, letter

  At any moment Manhattan could shank you, finish you off.

  —Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

  I could stay living in this city if they just installed Blaupunkts in the cabs.

  —Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

  Look for rock outcroppings. Manhattan is full of schist.

  —Fran Ross, Oreo

  If there’s an intellectual highway, there’s also an intellectual subway.

  —Stanley Crouch

  When you lead a life of scholarship you can’t be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

  —Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes

  Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship.

  —Malcolm Bradbury, Cuts

  He used to put his naked penis on the dinner table, laughing.

  —Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior

  I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand

  —Francesca Bell, poem title

  What I think about The New Yorker can only be expressed like this: *! @!!! @! *!!

  —Elizabeth Bishop, letter

  Take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin miles off the pace.

  —Irvine Welsh, on heroin, Trainspotting

  Picasso said the smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

  —Jean Cocteau

  Two Benadryl were a joke. Like blowing a snot rocket at a forest fire.

  —Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

  I don’t take any drugs, I take books.

  —Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

  Ink, a Drug.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

  No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

  —James Joyce, letter to his brother

  Get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin.

  —Ray Bradbury, Paris Review interview

  A deadline is a fine substitute for a genuinely literary urge.

  —Anthony Burgess

  You lazy cocksucker. I want that Thinkpiece on my desk by Labor Day.

  —Hunter S. Thompson, to Anthony Burgess

  You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.

  —Gore Vidal, on people with writer’s block

  Now everyone writes just like everyone poops.

  —Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

  If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.

  —Caitlin Moran

  At fifty … you’re as likable as you’re going to get.

  —Andrew Sean Greer, Less

  Once you are over fifty they look just over your head as if you were a janitor.

  —Jim Harrison, on women, The Beast God Forgot to Invent

  It’s every woman’s tragedy that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.

  —Angela Carter

  And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

  —Martin Amis, London Fields

  Their dumpling God.

  —Stanley Booth, describing the late Elvis Presley, in Esquire

  Fat, forty and back.

  —Sex Pistols reunion tour slogan

  An invitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

  —Arthur Symons

  Two of the saddest words in the English language are “What party?” And L.A. is the “What party” capital of the world.

  —Carrie Fisher

  John, I’d love to come to your party, but that would mean I would have to leave my house.

  —Johnny Cash, to John Prine

  If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.

  —Dorothy Parker

  Milk’s a queer arrangement.

  —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  You know what milk is? A kind of pus. Think about that, you’re guzzling pus.

  —Aravind Adiga, Amnesty

  Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Queer things always happen in pairs.

  —Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles

  Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

&nbs
p; —William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

  College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played.

  —H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

  Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds.

  —Red Smith

  Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

  —Jorge Luis Borges

  To the victors belong the spoiled.

  —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

  I don’t even know who Mr. Watergate is.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, 1974 interview

  I’m going to Iowa for an award. Then I’m appearing at Carnegie Hall, it’s sold out. Then I’m sailing to France to be honored by the French government—I’d give it all up for one erection.

  —Groucho Marx

  Take the headache.

  —B.B. King, to Buddy Guy, on the side effects of Viagra

  This heaven gives me migraine.

  —Gang of Four, “Natural’s Not in It”

  That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

  —Joan Didion, “In Bed”

  The basic measure of defensive manners is: weed your social garden.

  —Quentin Crisp, Manners from Heaven

  I’ll start right now by eliminating you.

  —Hattie McDaniel, on being told to eliminate her more “common” acquaintances

  If you think squash is a competitive activity try flower arrangement.

  —Alan Bennett, The Complete Talking Heads

  Who described gardening as “the slowest of the performing arts”?

  —Frederick Seidel, “To Mac Griswold”

  I hate roses. Don’t you? It’s all right if you can hide them in a cutting garden, but I think a rose garden is the height of ick.

  —Cy Twombly, in Vogue

  The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.

  —Daniel Odier and William S. Burroughs, The Job

  The best thing to do with a mimeograph is to drop

  it from a five story window, on the head of a cop.

  —Diane di Prima, “Goodbye Nkrumah”

  Their singing is like a train crashing down a high embankment: a whirlwind of shrieking and banging.

  —Anton Chekhov, on the Roma people, A Life in Letters

  There was Eel Pie Island and a hotel where people had once drunk bottled beer and danced to what Charles Dickens described in Nicholas Nickleby as a “locomotive band.” Sadly, no recorded evidence of this music survives.

  —Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink

  If only history were wired for sound.

  —Osbert Lancaster, Afternoons with Baedecker