Interior desecrators and natural downholsterers.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor, on cats
Cat shovel!
—Gregory Corso, “Marriage”
Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?
—Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
There was a purity and seriousness to the cat’s simple wish to be fucked immediately that Marian found refreshing.
—Nicholson Baker, The Fermata
Mkgnao!
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
—Thom Gunn
Almost all poetry is a failure because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem!
—Charles Bukowski
You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour.
—Nell Zink, Mislaid
Open all the mail away from your face.
—Advice for the poetry editor, in Don Paterson’s Best Thought, Worst Thought
When he is very sick, every man wants his mother.
—Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
—Robert Lowell
When an American sneezes, which should be thrown away, the paper handkerchief or the American?
—Auberon Waugh, Closing the Circle
Maybe beauty is medicine quivering on the spoon.
—Lucia Perillo, “Fubar”
Hope is a kind of rigor. Despair is sugar.
—Aravind Adiga, Amnesty
Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for.
—Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
—Do you want to go to bed with every woman you meet?
—Yes, I do.
—William Carlos Williams’s wife’s question, and his answer
The only proof we have of intelligent design is that Adam could not connect his mouth and his penis.
—Amit Majmudar, Dothead
A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked.
—Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
Clock strikes—going out to make love.
—Lord Byron, diary
Shall I compare thee to your place or mine?
—Veronica Geng, Love Trouble Is My Business
He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
—Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.
—Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be,
They bring it to you—free.
—Kingsley Amis
The one experience I shall never describe.
—Virginia Woolf
And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die.
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye
Even the living were only ghosts in the making.
—Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
It’s rather disconcerting to realize that you can’t take even a book with you.
—Drue Heinz
Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.
—James Salter
I feed the pages to the giant blue bullfrog.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on corner mailboxes, in A Man Without a Country
He was an unshucked oyster, hurtling on the winds, all air, gonad and gut.
—Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell
You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg.
—Robert Johnson, “Traveling Riverside Blues (Take 1)”
The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.
—Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News
No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
—Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Go to where the silence is and say something.
—Amy Goodman’s advice for journalists, in Columbia Journalism Review
Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.
—Frederick Seidel, Paris Review interview
I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.
—Tom Waits
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez
[My mother’s] way of teaching me about sex was giving me Colette to read.
—Patricia Bosworth, The Men in My Life
I don’t think much of Sade as a writer, although I enjoyed beating off to him as a child.
—Mary Gaitskill, interview
Even glancing at his throat made me lose my place in Montaigne.
—Mary Lee Settle, The Scapegoat
Howard preferred literate sex. Of course, if that wasn’t available, he’d take anything.
—T. Gertler, Elbowing the Seducer
All that short story heat!
—Lorrie Moore, on an affair between Donald Barthelme and Grace Paley, See What Can Be Done
Try to preserve the author’s style if he is an author and has a style.
—Wolcott Gibbs, “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles”
The worse the writer is, the more argument.
—Harold Ross, Letters from the Editor
If you tapped this sentence at one end, it would never stop rocking.
—Rogers E. M. Whitaker
This will cut like butter.
—Wolcott Gibbs
I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.
—Tina Brown, to George W. S. Trow
She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”
Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those for Nazism.
—Michel Houllebecq, The Possibility of an Island
If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
Say what you will about Charles Manson; he really empowered women to pursue excellence in traditionally male-dominated fields.
—Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic
Her eyes shone with Manson girl intent.
—Rupert Everett, on Madonna, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
To what extent should the attractive feel responsible for the sufferings of their admirers?
—Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life
I’m not even beautiful, but I can lay my hand on beauty.
—Sheila Heti, Motherhood
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
—Susan Sontag
The real curse of Eve.
—Jean Rhys, on the thirst to be beautiful and desired, The Left Bank
If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.
—Pauline Kael, “Fear of Movies”
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
—Alfred Hitchcock
Our planet’s groans at the weight of Hollywood sitting on its face.
—Rupert Everett, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
Purviews of cunning abstractions.
—Robert Coover, Going Out for a Beer
New ideas must use old buildings.
—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The house expressed surprise.
—Gish Jen, The Resisters
Is You
r Cornice Necessary?
—Title of a television series proposed by Kenneth Clark
I did not fully understand the dreaded term “terminal illness” until I saw Heathrow for myself.
—Dennis Potter, in The Sunday Times (London)
I am far from those I am with, and far from those I have left.
—Edna O’Brien, The Love Object
I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
—Sylvia Plath
To be adult is to be alone.
—Jean Rostand, The Substance of Man
We’re all so curiously alone. But it’s important to keep making signals through the glass.
—John Updike, in Life magazine
We never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
I was risking the possibility of a life where in the “In Case of Emergency Contact” space, I would repeatedly be writing “Me.”
—Lorrie Moore, “One Hot Summer, or a Brief History of Time”
I’ve fucked up my life. I’m angry because I’ve fucked up my life.
—Sonia Orwell, in David Plante’s Difficult Women
You’ve got ten fingers. Why not stick them in ten pies?
—Michael Frayn, Against Entropy
The pie full of white wine … being the greatest draught that ever I did see a woman drink in my life.
—Samuel Pepys, diary
It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate—you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.
—Julia Child, on nouvelle cuisine
Plate after plate after fucking plate.
—Sam Pink, The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories
There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people.
—George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí”
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness!
—Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
The sorry indignities that pass as currency between us in lieu of gentler tender.
—Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers
You always pull out Swift, when you are doing something disgusting.
—Philip Roth
It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.
—V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightaway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
—Emily Dickinson
I liked the English, with their hooting, stammering voices, their toasts, their Stilton and port, their light morals.
—Diane Johnson, Natural Opium
Grey little fey little island.
—Cyril Connolly, on England, The Unquiet Grave
Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots’ and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
—John Betjeman, “In Westminster Abbey”
If you merchandise tasteless little blobs of dough, you can sell billions of them by calling them “English” muffins.
—Paul Fussell, Class
It is a little known fact that the Queen has a marvelous sense of humor, especially if one tickles the soles of her feet with an ostrich feather.
—Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
Poets think they’re pitchers when they’re really catchers.
—Jack Spicer
Is encouragement what the poet needs?… Maybe he needs discouragement.
—Robert Fitzgerald
What I could use at the moment is
a little destruction perpetrated in my favor.
—A. R. Ammons, “Positions”
Rust their typewriters a little, be sea air! be noxious! kill them, if you must, but stop their poetry!
—Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air”
If it is broken, so am I.
—Deborah Levy, on her laptop, Hot Milk
If we don’t post it, it never happened.
—Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot
I will send a picture too
if you will send me one of you.
—Robert Creeley, “The Conspiracy”
Maybe googling people kills them.
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
To live is to war with trolls.
—Henrik Ibsen
Somebody put it on the Internet and it went bacterial.
—Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses
Waiting for some lover
to kick me out of bed
for having acted on a whim.
—Paul Muldoon, “Maggot”
If somebody liked to dress up in chamois leather and be stung by wasps, I really couldn’t see why one should stop him.
—Kenneth Tynan, quoting Robert Morley, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan
A polymorphous game of button-button with sweetmeats at the end.
—Robert Christgau, describing a make-out session, Going into the City
How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains?
—Donald Barthelme, Snow White
I have joined an ancient fraternity. I have killed a man.
—Hubert Selby, Jr., Waiting Period
You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Kills You.
—The Notorious B.I.G., song title
For me violent moments are always existential moments. They are crucial.
—Norman Mailer, Paris Review interview
What then, art director? Graphics consultant? What is the layout? It is this: to shoot him from behind, somewhere on the top of the gorge.
—James Dickey, Deliverance
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
I may have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
—Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life
Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman.
—Dorothy Parker
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
—Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Shyness is shit. It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit.
—Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories
Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness.
—Violet Trefusis, letter to Vita Sackville-West
The Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable.
—Jean Rhys, letter
“Women’s fiction” doesn’t sound like anything but a slur to my ears.
—Sheila Heti
Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.
—Hilary Mantel
Were all women devastatingly superior to men, or was it just these two compared to me?
—Gish Jen, The Resisters
If I’m going to skate, I’m going to race.
—Ken Kesey, interview
We ice-skated to “Eve of Destruction.”
—Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Every writer is a skater, and must go partly where he would, and partly where the skates carry him.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Until you’ve potato-raced against a congenital one-legged man in a sack you haven’t potato-raced.
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
Snobbery is a form of despair.
—Joseph Brodsky, interview
I expect I am something of a snob … I am pleased to be friends with people of distinguished lineage.
—Isaiah Berlin, Affirming
Virginians are all snobs,
and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little left to meddle with you.
—William Faulkner
Elitism is reprehensible only when it is snobbish and exclusive. The best sort of elitism tries to expand the elite by encouraging more and more people to join it.
—Richard Dawkins, Brief Candle in the Dark
All women under the sun are unscrupulous if there is something they want.
—Muriel Spark, The Bachelors
When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.
—Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.
—Elsa Schiaparelli
She wears her Cloaths as if they were thrown on with a Pitch-Fork.
—Jonathan Swift
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
—Pauline Kael
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Opening line of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
—Sylvia Plath, “Elm”
The sun is a joke.
—Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Take this pudding away. It has no theme.
—Winston Churchill
To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Make a remark, said the Red Queen, it’s ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding.
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Forty—sombre anniversary to the hedonist.
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
—Allan Gurganus, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
At seventy, I’m at last more at ease with what Homer Simpson called his womanly needs.
—Les Murray, Killing the Black Dog
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
—Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Ham held the same rating as the basic black dress. If you had a ham in the meat house any situation could be faced.
—Edna Lewis, The Taste of Country Cooking
Love isn’t saying, I love you, but calling to say, did you eat?
—Marlon James, The Book of Night Women