You know how stringy white folks necks gits when dey gits ole.
—Zora Neale Hurston, “Squinch Owl Story”
A writer is like a bean plant—he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
—E. B. White
It’s 10 o’clock at night—do you know where your clitoris is?
—Sign at Ms. magazine under Gloria Steinem
I’m going to keep a little clothespin on my clit and then I can pinch it if I want!
—Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy
A clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York’s natural harbor.
—Rem Koolhaas, on Coney Island, Delirious New York
I don’t think he would ever sign a contract with someone fat. He assigns moral values to fatness.
—Paul Theroux, on V. S. Naipaul
I’m tall and thin … but my life is square and small.
—Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
No man has ever made a more dramatic demonstration of the aesthetic reasons that people shouldn’t get bloated.
—Pauline Kael, on Robert De Niro’s weight gain in Raging Bull, Taking It All In
Don’t be a fathead.
—Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
If you won’t talk to me I’ll write about your face. If you won’t look at me I’ll write about the back of your head.
—Roy Blount Jr., About Three Bricks Shy: And the Load Filled Up
Research is formalized curiosity.
—Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat”
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
—Tom Stoppard, Night and Day
A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.
—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.
—Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
—G. K. Chesterton
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.
—Don DeLillo, Libra
When I have tense relations with my wife, we speak in Arabic. When we talk business, then we speak English. When our relationship is better, then we talk French.
—Boutros Boutros-Ghali
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels”
U R 2 good 2 B 4 got 10.
—Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop
M takes mustard, N drives into town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead.
—Howard Nemerov, “A Primer of the Daily Round”
Accusing novelists of egotism is like deploring the tendency of champion boxers to turn violent.
—Martin Amis, The Rub of Time
Other people. Someone should have told me about them a long time ago.
—Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson
Nobody, nobody is good enough.
—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
How fantastically far one is from being humble … I want to be admired.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive—but not talk about it too much.
—Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
Writerly anti-nonfamous.
—Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
I am your number one fan.
—Kathy Bates, in Misery
Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicized her personal pronouns.
—Henry James, Washington Square
Everybody has to feel superior to somebody, she said. But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
—May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?
—No, it did lots of other things, too.
—James Joyce’s reply
My wang was all I really had that I could call my own.
—Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
It was big but it was cuter’n a speckled pup under a red wagon.
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
The tripod.
—Nickname of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The fact is a wire through which one sends a current.
—Saul Bellow
Facts are subversive.
—I. F. Stone
Mimesis—you can’t beat it.
—John Updike, Bech: A Book
No fact ever contradicted a tree.
—Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
Who can refute a sneer?
—William Paley
He checks his facts until they weep with boredom.
—Clive James, on Bob Woodward, Latest Readings
Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can’t have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out to be not the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else’s expense or do and undergo things it’s not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It’s also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.
—Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb
Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy,
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
—John Betjeman, “In Westminster Abbey”
How could the notion that we were modern even arise when people were dropping all around us?
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two
Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down … You would buy shares in death, if they were available.
—Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.
—J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?
—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis
—How often do you have sex?
—Twice as often as everyone else.
—Ian McEwan, Guardian interview
I’m always hawny in the mawnin’.
—Andre Dubus III, Townie
We always exuded better sex than we had.
—John Updike, “Midpoint”
That’s like foreplay for us. You say cryptic things I don’t understand, I give inadequate responses, you laugh at me, and then we have sex.
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
Intercourse is better than no course at all.
—A. R. Ammons, “Analysis Mines and Leaves to Heal”
Better to grasp at straws than not to grasp at all.
—Gish Jen, The Resisters
There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.
—John Prine, “Sam Stone”
I am running out of everything now. Out of veins. Out of money.
—William S. Burroughs
All this work, I complained, is fucking with my high.
—Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I
would have paid double for them.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
What lies will we lie down with tonight?
—Rita Dove, “Beauty and the Beast”
We lie everywhere but on top of each other.
—Rebecca Schiff, The Bed Moved
Never to lie is to have no lock to your door.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
—Saki, The Complete Saki
Query: Is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?
—E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady
I miss brains, hate this cow life.
—Sylvia Plath, letter
The thing about cows is they’re dressed all in leather, he said. Head to toe, nothing but leather. It’s badass. I mean when you really think about it.
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
I want words meat-hooked from the living steer.
—Robert Lowell, “The Nihilist as Hero”
There’s a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.
—James Dickey, Self-Interviews
A good ole boy can become an intellectual, but an intellectual cannot become a good ole boy.
—James McMurtry, quoting a friend, Live in Aught-Three
Shakespeare, the brilliant country boy.
—Delmore Schwartz, “Iago, or the Lowdown on Life”
What someone doesn’t want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.
—Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb
Gall is a basic tool of journalism.
—Hunter S. Thompson, in Juan Thompson’s Stories I Tell Myself
“I’m on deadline” can get you out of things … Whatever kind of work you do, it’s always cooler to be on deadline.
—Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life
Any man has to, needs to, wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in.
—T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes
I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least seventy-five percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.
—Lester Bangs
Men often ask me, Why are your female characters so paranoid? It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.
—Margaret Atwood, Paris Review interview
If any two people could ever really get inside each other’s head, it would scare the pee out of both of them.
—John D. MacDonald, Dress Her in Indigo
What one can hide inside one’s head and smile.
—Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers
Bad art smells human in all the wrong ways.
—Gertrude Stein, attributed
Enjoying someone else’s smell—the most modest form of guilt there is.
—Francesco Pacifico, Class
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
—George Gissing
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!
—Samuel Coleridge, “Cologne”
The marigold smell of multiple occupancy.
—Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
—Charlie Chaplin
The laughter of unrespectable people having a hell of a fine time.
—James Agee, on silent movie houses, Agee on Film
If you can make a reader laugh, he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
—Henry Green
You have to laugh trouble down to a size where you can talk about it.
—Dan Jenkins
A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
—Clive James
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she’s there all day.
—Philip Larkin, “Self’s the Man”
He hates women.
—Jeanette Winterson, on Vladimir Nabokov, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele
Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.
—Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire
Spare me from cooking three meals a day.
—Sylvia Plath, diary
You are old when the waiter doesn’t mention that you are holding the menu upside down.
—Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses
“Waiter” is such a funny word. It is we who wait.
—Muriel Spark, A Good Comb
There is something triumphant about a really disgusting meal.
—Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking
Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassière.
—Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
The lengthy and rather hysterical debate about the film Thelma & Louise … was predicated on the idea that stories are supposed to function as instruction manuals.
—Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer
Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction.
—Robert Penn Warren, Paris Review interview
O, a meaning!
—Archibald MacLeish, “Voyage to the Moon”
Show me a plague and I’ll show you the world!
—Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume One
The friends of the born nurse
are always getting worse.
—W. H. Auden
You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.
—Katharine Whitehorn
There it sits, fat and awful.
—Iris Murdoch, on her latest novel, in Living on Paper
—What’s Augie March about?
—It’s about 200 pages too long.
—Saul Bellow
Question: Mr. Stoppard, what is your play about? Answer: It’s about to make me rich.
—Tom Stoppard
A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious.
—Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
If that’s what his face looks like, imagine his scrotum!
—David Hockney, attributed, on W. H. Auden
It’s the kind of face you’d be wearing if your face read the way you felt about the way things were.
—Robert Coover, Noir
To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.
—Harold Brodkey, “Innocence”
To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.
—Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Boredom slays more of existence than war.
—Norman Mailer, Paris Review interview
So boring, he is like a hearse stood up on end.
—Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
You meet people in your family you’d never happen to run into otherwise.
—Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes
The family religion was judgement.
—David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper
Somewhere back along your pedigree—a bitch got over the wall!
—Robert Bolt, A Man for all Seasons
It is
no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
—P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
I’m from the gutter. And don’t you ever forget it because I won’t.
—Joe Orton, The Orton Diaries
The shabbier the snobbier.
—Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me
At every interval of eating or drinking he played on the table with a fork and knife, like a drumstick.
—An observer, on George Washington
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings.
—Humphrey Bogart, in The Big Sleep
Fuck her. I like eating like this.
—Aravind Adiga, Amnesty
I’d listen to the little slurping noises she made as she sucked the liquid in, and I used to hate her for that as for the most heinous act.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
Conduct! Is conduct everything? One may conduct oneself excellently, and yet break one’s heart.
—Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne
—Cy Twombly: You would be happy if I just kept well dressed and [had] good manners.
—His mother: What else is there?
—Quoted in Sally Mann, Hold Still
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
—Christopher Hitchens
Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.
—Fran Lebowitz
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
—Howard Nemerov, attributed
No interviews. No panels. No speeches. No comments. Stay out of the spotlight. It fades your suit.
—Lew Wasserman
Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein
I would trade half of Childe Harold for … an interview with Byron and all of Adam Bede for the same with George Eliot.
—Wilfrid Sheed, The Good Word and Other Words
Don’t treat him like God. It wigs him out. Don’t dive into his soul, he finds that insulting.
—Advice given to interviewers by Bob Dylan’s office
It’s like going around explaining how you sleep with your wife.
—Philip Larkin, on talking about his writing
Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.
—Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
Sloanes can become hard of hearing if you’re wearing the wrong shoes. How can one really understand a person wearing the wrong shoes?
—Ann Barr and Peter York, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook
Garner's Quotations Page 11