Quote collection
316 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself."
"Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying."
"I give her sadness and the gift of pain, a new moon madness and a love of rain."
"This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine."
"When you have to apologize, it is well, I suppose, to get the thing over quickly."
"She was pleased to have him come and never sorry to see him go."
"London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it."
"I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, "How gay 'twould be To hang me from a flowering tree."
"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."
"He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight."
"Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi."
"ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon."
"All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me."
"The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only."
"A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and therefore, most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate."
"Said after she had been seriously ill: The doctors were very brave about it."
"I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it."
"In the pathway of the sun, In the footsteps of the breeze, Where the world and sky are one, He shall ride the silver seas, He shall cut the glittering wave. I shall sit at home, and rock; Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock; Brew my tea, and snip my thread; Bleach the linen for my bed. They will call him brave."
"I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion."
"Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost."