Lordy, I hope there are tapes.
—James Comey
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
—G. K. Chesterton
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
—Ezra Pound
When people don’t walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.
—John Osborne
Ovations are cheap in America; it’s almost as if they stand because they have spent so much money.
—Patti LuPone
How is it so few can stand a play cold sober?
—Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles
If you turn that title around you will have an idea of what I thought of that one.
—Groucho Marx, on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape
Roget’s trollop.
—What Sylvia Plath called herself when too wordy
A penis with a thesaurus.
—David Foster Wallace, quoting a friend, on John Updike
I am not a bum or a lecher or a gigolo or some kind of walking penis.
—Philip Roth, My Life as a Man
He thought he’d feel like Dustin Hoffman
Driving his penis up to Berkeley.
—Sam Riviere, “Vehicles of Mercy”
The shit they was talking about was too white for me.
—Miles Davis, on dropping out of Juilliard
Does that white skin cover your eyes, too?
—Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest
There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
Sooner or later whitey will take a swing at the left nut of my psyche and shout “nigger.”
—Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About
When you grab me again, whitey, you are going to have two handfuls of 168 pounds of pure black hell.
—Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Negro has been fucked through the years and in many different positions in this country.
—Charles Wright, The Messenger
Any way they could deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.
—Nate Shaw, in All God’s Dangers
Even black will crack if you beat it enough.
—Roya Marsh, dayliGht
I have no gun, but I can spit.
—W. H. Auden
A lady spat backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me. But after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.
—Samuel Pepys, diary
Save the rest to grease your cock in case a skunk comes by you want to screw.
—Ann Beattie, on spit, Falling in Place
There were four ice cubes left. I brought up phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer.
—Don DeLillo, Americana
I’m not a good person … Sorry, that’s the way it is.
—Susan Sontag, Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947–1963
When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Would Goldilocks have broken into the bears’ cottage if she’d seen a sign on the gate that said ARMED RESPONSE?
—Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
I found that walking around with a gun in your pants is very different from walking around without a gun in your pants.
—Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Others
I regret the gun was purchased, as it has been a sad obstacle to reading.
—The Reverend John Skinner, diary
I like engineers. They build things that are useful and sometimes beautiful—a brick sewer, a suspension bridge—and take little credit. They do not wear black and designer glasses like architects. They do not crow.
—Rose George, The Big Necessity
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
—Victor Stenger
Our goddamn Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy fucking name.
—Téa Obreht, Inland
Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.
—Dave Hickey
Do it in your own time, in private, like masturbation.
—Kingsley Amis, on religion
I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
There is no God and we are his prophets.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, on publishers
The two most beautiful words in the English language are “check enclosed.”
—Dorothy Parker
Would rather change publisher than title.
Fucked and Humiliated would have been a good title, a bit of trash Dostoyevsky.
—Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin
She would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money.
—Sally Rooney, Normal People
I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.
—Yves Mirande, quoted by A. J. Liebling
He stands too near his printer; he corrects the proofs.
—Henry David Thoreau, The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861
A forty-fifth reunion is not the best place to come looking for ass.
—Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Welcoming a penis just seems more womanly to me than baking chocolate chip cookies or doling out money for a grandchild’s college tuition.
—Helen Gurley Brown, The Late Show
On some level, I’m always full of Girl Scout cookies.
—Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
I remain awkward and uncertain while staying in other people’s houses.
—Jenny Diski, In Gratitude
If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was seeing other people’s bedrooms.
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Four
Don’t talk so much with your mouth.
—Fran Ross, Oreo
Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut?
—Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Try not to talk when you’re sober, darling.
—Chelsey Minnis, “Boredom”
Every conversation is a podcast if you close your eyes.
—Karen Chee, on Twitter
And their talk was a refuge.
—Paule Marshall
If this sofa could talk, we’d have to burn it.
—Eudora Welty, in a hotel with Reynolds Price
I had seen Miss Welty buying a frozen pizza at the Jitney Jungle one time.
—Rick Bass, The Traveling Feast
Fuck you, fuck pizza, and fuck Frank Sinatra, too.
—Spike Lee, in Do the Right Thing
The director recommends that, when the film is shown, a toaster oven containing several heads of garlic be turned on in the rear of the theater, unbeknownst to the audience.
—Les Blank, on how to screen his documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers
Just for the fun of it, run into a delicatessen and holler out the French name for garlic: Aiieee.
—Bruce Jay Friedman, The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life
No! you won’t ’eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells.
—Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay”
Hell is other people fucking.
—David Gilbert, And Sons
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
—Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
The neighbors in the adjoining room make love … every day with a frenzy which makes me jealous … I envy people who can scream.
—Marcel Proust
If we keep on fucking, I’m not gonna die.
—Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld
You don’t even really give a fuck when we’re fucking any more.
—Ali Smith, Spring
This isn’t going to un-fuck itself.
—Colson Whitehead, Zone One
O Florida. O, cold Florida. Could any state be horrida?
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life.
—Cynthia Ozick, “Rosa”
Nothing down here but scorpions, lizards, vast spiders, mosquitos, vast cockroaches & thorns in the grass.
—Jack Kerouac, letter to Joyce Johnson, in her memoir, Minor Characters
A very deep tan is a tricky thing.
—John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By
Tans are an enemy of sex.
—John Updike, “In Memoriam Felis Felis”
Roll me over on the grill I’m done on this side.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy
When a man gets trouble in his mind
He wanna sleep all the time.
—Bukka White, “Sleepy Man Blues”
I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.
—Emilie Autumn
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
—Zadie Smith
He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.
—Martin Amis, The Information
To play against him is like playing against an inebriated kangaroo.
—Ford Madox Ford, on Ezra Pound’s tennis game
With a great splashing like a dog retrieving a ball.
—Antonia Fraser, on Harold Pinter’s swimming, Must You Go?
You can’t be deep without a surface.
—Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet
The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.
—Richard Avedon
The body’s surface … about as serious a thing as there is in life.
—Philip Roth, American Pastoral
It seemed that the face does matter, because it affects the man behind it.
—Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes
Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up.
—Jean Rhys, age twelve
The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
—Walter Kirn, Mission to America
It’s really quite remarkable how complete the illusion is that beauty is the same as goodness.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
The closest most people get to photographing a friend’s central nervous system.
—James Hamblin, on red eye, If Our Bodies Could Talk
Bad news is always true.
—John Giorno, “Thanx 4 Nothing”
Anything that consoles is fake.
—Iris Murdoch
Prayer’s a joke, love a secretion,
the tortured torture, and worse gets worse.
—John Updike, “Spanish Sonnets”
The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from.
—Tracy K. Smith, “No-Fly Zone”
He may be dead; or, he may be teaching English.
—Cormac McCarthy
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
—Roy Blount Jr.
Your opinion doesn’t matter; you are only a schoolteacher.
—Robert Penn Warren, to Harold Bloom, over dinner
I’ve seen academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.
—Susan Sontag, Paris Review interview
Where psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born.
—Ted Pauker, “A Grouchy Good Night to the Academic Year”
For the stories, man, the stories.
—Charlie Parker, on why he liked country music
Farm emo.
—Overheard, on country music
Country music is like good grammar. You know it when you hear it, and you know what it’s not.
—Dave Hickey, “Dolly Parton’s Songs”
Hillybilly stuff is not just music. It’s like the New York Stock Exchange. The minute you see a sharp rise in it, you better watch out.
—James Alan McPherson, “Why I Like Country Music”
Jingobilly.
—Martin Amis, on the type of music played at Republican conventions
Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!
—Leslie Fiedler, essay title
Blow smoke rings
if you can. Or
blow me.
—James Schuyler, “A Few Days”
It’s true, I haven’t had head since Eisenhower.
—Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Others
Speaking in the literature sense, the cop said, grinning, this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Ann Rice than Armistead Maupin.
—Stephen King, Desperation
It is little known that I am the only human being in the world who has changed sex and then changed back again.
—Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read—and I’m crying.
—Joseph Papp, on Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart
There’s the man who murdered all of daddy’s friends.
—Larry Kramer, to his dog, every time he passed Ed Koch
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
—William Gass, Paris Review interview
I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!
—Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Unless I tell you otherwise I am always flipping somebody off.
—Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver
Your mania for sentences, my mother said, has dried up your heart.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857
When you write about the people you hate the most, do it with love.
—Hubert Selby, Jr., attributed
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
—Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man
If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise.
—Edward St. Aubyn, Lost for Words
It’s like seeing Kate Moss take a shit.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, on her fiction, in Vice
Sometimes I’m at stool all night.
—Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Writing about rock & roll…! I mean … you know, how indecent can you be?
—Bob Dylan, radio interview
People pay to see others believe in themselves.
—Kim Gordon
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
—G. K. Chesterton
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
—Hunter S. Thompson
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
—Pablo Neruda, “Every Day You Play”
The trees
Laid their dark arms about the field.
&nbs
p; —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 95”
Spring is yea and nay.
—Christina Rossetti, “Summer”
Like pressing your face into wet grass.
—Willem de Kooning, on Larry Rivers’s painting
There is too much blank sky where a tree once stood.
—Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
Turn left by the old house that used to be there before it burned down.
—Robert Creeley, On Earth
I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.
—Ingeborg Bachmann
Smart editors let other people snatch their chestnuts out of the fire for them.
—Jim Comstock, in The West Virginia Hillbilly
I was at the end of my rope about people. Widespread travel encourages deepest misanthropy.
—Diane Johnson, Natural Opium
Staying in town during the summer is a sin worse than pederasty and sheep-buggering.
—Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
You feel suddenly—oh, well, all right, I can face this place if I must, as long as there’s Penguins.
—Christopher Isherwood, on books, The Sixties: Diaries 1960–1969
This then is a book! And there are more of them!
—Emily Dickinson, letter
Republicans think that all over the world
darker-skinned people are having more fun
than they are. It’s largely true.
—Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
I had been black for a long time. Before black was beautiful.
—Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
—James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Many a good book has dark covers.
—Agrippa Hull
Playing the blues in the old days was like being black twice.
—Lightnin’ Hopkins
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred.
—Langston Hughes, “Dream Boogie”
A humming ship of voices
big with all
the wrongs done
done them.
—Rita Dove, “Gospel”
Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.
—Leonard Michaels, The Collected Stories
What is a white person who walks into a James Brown or Sam and Dave song?
—Amiri Baraka, Black Music
White reverb.
—Michael Dickman, “Lakes Rivers Streams”
Save me from bigoted old white bitches.
—Wanda Coleman, “April 15th 1985”