Those who would reject you because you are wearing the wrong shoes are not worth being accepted by.
—Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton
What was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?
—Elif Batuman, The Idiot
To the disinterested, a foot fetishist is ridiculous; right away you imagine a pathetic cringer who works at Thom McAn.
—Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer
I find it hard to relax around any man who’s got the second button on his shirt undone.
—Bill Nighy
Love me, love my dirty shirt.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
History’s meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane.
—Simon Schama, on Downton Abbey
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present.
—Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
—Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize lecture
The sex act cruelly mimics history’s decline and fall.
—Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, White Teeth
The great drive-in screen of the future.
—Gish Jen, Who’s Irish?
Have you decided yet what historical moment you would have most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?
—Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood
It’s a form of terrorism not to bomb this town.
—Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Are you not the color of this country’s current threat
Advisory?
—Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Do you periodically walk around and check to see that “the area is secure”?
—Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood
Terror, no need to add,
Depends on who’s wearing the hood.
—Roger Woddis, “Ethics for Everyman”
If Americans experience sublimity
the terrorists have won.
—Ben Lerner, “Mad Lib Elegy”
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
—Don DeLillo, Mao II
—Fatwa sex?
—The best sex there is.
—Larry David and Salman Rushdie, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Charming friends need not possess minds.
—Muriel Spark, All the Stories of Muriel Spark
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
—Evelyn Waugh
We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous.
—Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
If you want your book to get a bad review, have a friend do it.
—Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin
I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.
—Attributed to Joseph Conrad and Arnold Bennett
Class! Yes, it’s still here. Terrific staying power, and against all the historical odds.
—Martin Amis, London Fields
Class warfare is one of the few interesting or worthwhile areas of politics, of course, keeping the rich on their toes and giving the poor something to think about.
—Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
I’d like to see you move up to the goat-class where I think you belong.
—Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.
—Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
[His public school accent] got on my tits like anything.
—Angela Carter
Her accent alone burned a hole in my lower intestines.
—Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Others
Let’s buy a castle and murder King Duncan and settle down.
—John Updike, Bech Is Back
If you want a piece of property to go downhill, just leave it in the care of a bunch of word people.
—Madeleine Blais, To the New Owners
The simple question “What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?” might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: “How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?”
—Donald Antrim, The Verificationist
There’s nothing that irritates me so much as paying rent.
—Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
One square foot less and it would be adulterous.
—Robert Benchley, on an office shared with Dorothy Parker
You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
—Barry Hannah
A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.
—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
I expect you’ve got a lot of those goddam maple trees doing their stuff over there.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
All the trees had dropped acid.
—Raymond Mungo, Total Loss Farm
Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.
—Nora Ephron, Heartburn
I say reject both [poems]. The Poplar one is just another tree one to me and, so help me God, I’m for a moratorium on trees for two or three years.
—Harold Ross, Letters from the Editor
The best things in life are free. The second best are very, very expensive.
—Coco Chanel, attributed
The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.
—Katharine Whitehorn
It’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Thank you for this night like a bag of yellow Doritos.
—Veronica Geng, Love Trouble Is My Business
Fritos are so nutritious.
—Marianne Moore, to Donald Hall
The greatest meal of my life involved a Triscuit.
—Jonathan Miles, “A Taste for the Hunt”
Has anybody noticed that we haven’t won a game since we ate that chicken á la king?
—Jim Bouton, Ball Four
I thank God I am a man of low tastes.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
If you happen to catch … me in a low dive my excuse is simple: “I’m writing a book.”
—Leonard R. N. Ashley, “The Cockney’s Hornbook”
Bring us a basin! We’re going to be sick!
—Roald Dahl, Matilda
Shelley just barfed on a Dodge Colt with a Wellesley College window decal.
—Susan Orlean, Saturday Night
He seems to be vomiting someone’s taupe pajamas.
—Don DeLillo, Underworld
Puking seems to have perked you up.
—Yasmina Reza, God of Carnage
Vomit is passionate.
—Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians
Cough it up, man. Get it out in bits.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
You can’t really dust for vomit.
—This Is Spinal Tap
Bee vomit, he said once
that’s all honey is.
—Rita Dove, “In the Old Neighborhood”
Good greaser vomit! Pablo digs good greaser vomit!
—Terry Southern, Red-Dirt Marijuana
I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.
—William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on th
e press for my information.
—Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
—Jessica Mitford
We like to appear in the newspapers
So long as we are in the right column.
—T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
Then shall we be news-crammed.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It
One reason cats are happier than people
is that they have no newspapers.
—Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca
You are not a nice boy, David … Stick to the wicked.
—Philip Roth, to David Hare, about Hare’s work
It’s not your fate to be well treated, Ignatius cried. You’re an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you.
—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Between two evils, I always pick the one I have never tried before.
—Mae West
Red or white?
—The three most depressing words in the English language, according to Kingsley Amis
My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel.
—Clive James
Black Boy,
beware of wine labels,
for the Republic does not guarantee
what the phrase “Château Bottled” means.
—Melvin B. Tolson, “PSI”
I don’t like my wine in capsules.
—Gioacchino Rossini, on grapes
I wish we had some more glasses of arbor vitae.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.
—Don DeLillo, Zero K
We weren’t poor, we just didn’t have any money.
—Thomas Hart Benton, attributed
A way of keeping yourself feeling rich and civilized even when you’re quite poor.
—Marie Ponsot, on reading poetry
The rich can afford to be virtuous, the poor must shift as best they can.
—Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman
That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.
—George Gissing
I make a lunge for the dollar, the eagle flies in the opposite direction.
—Charles Wright, The Messenger
He calls them shithawks.
—Lucia Perillo, on eagles, quoting a friend, “Serotonin”
When I hear a man talk of Sound Finance, I know him for an enemy of the people.
—Hyde Park orator, in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks
He did not follow the fat gods.
—Saul Bellow
Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.
—Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, via Roger Angell
The Queen’s fart.
—Silent method of opening a champagne bottle
An imperfectly suppressed fart.
—John Barth, on what the word “spoof” sounds like
I remember you, you came in my mouth and it tasted like strawberries.
—Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
He looked up from his fried chicken and said, I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth.
—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
The trouble with this country is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.
—John Berryman, to James Dickey
Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
—Samuel Johnson
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true.
—Emily Dickinson
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
—Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches
—Edmund Wilson, play title
Gin thou wert mine awn thing.
—John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
I’m Saving My Blackheads for You
—Loudon Wainwright III, song title
My lungs are thick with the smoke
of your absence.
—Raymond Carver, “A Forge, and a Scythe”
Your body is opium and you are its only true smoker.
—Brenda Shaughnessy, “Your One Good Dress”
I was the kind of pothead who looked like a small cloud being propelled by a pair of legs.
—Clive James, Latest Readings
When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently. That was the point.
—Barack Obama
No smoking in bars. What next, no fucking in bars?
—Kim Cattrall, in Sex in the City
Even the smell of tobacco made a man more rational.
—Aravind Adiga, Amnesty
Then, worst of all, the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?
—W. H. Auden, “On the Circuit”
Smokeless and breadless, we face a bad weekend.
—Dylan Thomas, Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances, and I represent the proletariat.
—Gene Kelly
We can’t all be proletarians, you know.
—Dwight Macdonald, letter
Reverse snobbery, unlike the traditional kind, is a tribute to democracy—it’s egalitarianism overshooting the mark.
—Michael Kinsley, “O’Reilly Among the Snobs”
My place comfortable in the lowerarchy.
—A. R. Ammons, “Hibernaculum”
—Bruce Springsteen’s parents, to a gas station attendant, upon arriving in California, in his Born to Run
But the peasants. How do the peasants die?
—Leo Tolstoy’s last words, attributed
Haven’t you noticed that every time the government fucks up McDonald’s has a new sandwich?
—Bill Burr
The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful men on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without a Country
No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time.
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am
My nipples are like the teats of a rain-god.
—Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein
The majesty of a nipple not yet touched.
—A. R. Ammons, “The Gathering”
The Nipple.
—What regulars call the NYPL (New York Public Library)
For manual workers nipples are a trial. One has to sandpaper the hauns before going to bed with one’s woman.
—James Kelman, You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free
I think he’s a natural playwright. He writes by sanded fingertips.
—Lillian Hellman, on Tennessee Williams
People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.
—Graham Greene
Life itself is a quotation.
—Jorge Luis Borges
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats and one always secretes too much jelly.
—Virginia Woolf
They dug each other’s references and felt smarter in each other’s presence.
—Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
What is that unforgettable line?
—Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
It is invariably oneself that one collects.
—Jean Baudrillard
The premonition of apocalypse springs ete
rnal in the human breast.
—Irving Kristol, On the Democratic Idea in America
Who opens the morning papers without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing another great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself.
—Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
A sliver off the comet of the American chaos had come loose.
—Philip Roth, American Pastoral
I just like people with some Looney Tune in their souls.
—Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
They don’t have any gizzards. We had gizzards, man.
—Roy Blount Jr., quoting Dwight White of the Pittsburgh Steelers on the bland teams that followed his, About Three Bricks Shy: And the Load Filled Up
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they probably begin by calling “charismatic.”
—Christopher Hitchens, And Yet
I’m an alcoholic, goddamn it!
—Dwight Macdonald, when asked why he drank so much, A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald
I hereby charge and assert that the testy but lovable Boswell who annotates by old laundry slips, Dwight Macdonald, drinks tea.
—Tom Wolfe, letter to the editor, in The New York Review of Books
The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.
—Franz Wright, “Alcohol”
Hubcap ripping and parked-car creeping, dime-store clipping and window peeping.
—Chuck Berry, on petty crime, The Autobiography
I love the con, crises are my fuel.
—Clancy Sigal, Black Sunset
Faint heart never fucked a pig.
—Philip Prowse, attributed
Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder?
—Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
Don’t buy. Steal. If you act like it’s yours, no one will ask you to pay for it.
—Jerry Rubin, Do It
Nobody steals books but your friends.
—Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon
My friends have signed copies of my books that I did not sign.
—Gabriel García Márquez, The Scandal of the Century
There are no innocent bystanders. What are they doing there in the first place?
—William S. Burroughs, My Education
Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.
—Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
—Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
My friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.
—Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
How many women can you butt-dial in one evening!
—Frederick Seidel, “Abusers”
Should I have butt implants? Are my tits pointing in the right direction?