Quote collection
389 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The first time I ever saw platform shoes in the '70s, I knew they'd been revived from the '40s, and I felt sickened. And for whatever reason, they keep getting revived. They've come back four times. I wish we could let them die. They want to die. They were horrible then, they're horrible now."
"I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?"
"Because I was young, I had this long hair, and people used to try to tip me with joints."
"When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree."
"New York's not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists."
"Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come."
"Even if people aren't Republicans, it doesn't seem shocking to them that Ronald Reagan was the president. Well of course, because Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor! This is not only a bar too low, this is no bar at all. I don't care who you are, you know 20 people smarter than Ronald Reagan. You know 20 people who would be a better president than Ronald Reagan."
"I could not possibly be in a relationship now for more than six days. When I was younger, I might have said six months, although I think the longest relationship I was ever in was three years."
"The great thing about New Jersey is that it's close to New York."
"For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about - the movies."
"I never would start writing before midnight and I would finish at, like, seven in the morning."
"I hate money. It is boring and it is arithmetic. The two things I hate the most."
"I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming "uh-huh, yes?"
"I think humor is warmer, and wit is colder. Wit is judgment, whereas humor invites some sort of response."
"The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do."
"I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself."
"No one I knew talked about money. It's not an area of interest."
"All style is personal - that's what distinguishes it from fashion."
"Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter."
"There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world."