Quote collection
169 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft."
"The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic."
"With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs."
"Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge."
"The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road."
"Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn"
"If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps."
"Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other"
"Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After."
"I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40."
"This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave."
"Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage."
"Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light. We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." But I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness."
"Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog"
"Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man."
"I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight."
"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."
"Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats."
"I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
"It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home."