What has love ever meant to me but creaking stairs in other people’s houses?
—Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine.
—Anaïs Nin, diary
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.
—Hunter S. Thompson, attributed
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
—William G. T. Shedd, attributed
Let other people frequent nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.
—Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
—Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York
The West Side Writing and Asthma Club.
—Club cofounded by Groucho Marx
She was just as pretty as a peeled onion.
—Nate Shaw, on a mule, in All God’s Dangers
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
—William Faulkner
A small-bore man, over his head, and riding a bad horse.
—Ben Bradlee, on Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, A Good Life
Nothing is more terrible than ignorance with spurs on.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Very ugly emotions perhaps make a poem.
—Robert Lowell, Paris Review interview
He put his woes in verse,
And sold them to a magazine.
—Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Then and Now”
What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation.
—Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love
You aint gonna believe this … Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons … damn near screwed the whole patch.
—Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
Red cold
guffaw of summer,
slice
of watermelon!
—José Juan Tablada, “Haiku” (translated by Samuel Beckett)
Let us always have a vast condom within us to protect the health of our soul amid the filth into which it is plunged.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857
The only thing you can depend on with condoms is that they will take 20 to 50 percent off your fuck.
—Norman Mailer, in conversation with Madonna
Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
We stage an orgie—so delightful that it knocks me out.
—Theodore Dreiser, The American Diaries, 1902–1926
An austere orgy is no orgy at all.
—John D. MacDonald, Dress Her in Indigo
I believe in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean.
—G. K. Chesterton
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The hot tub—a sous vide bath of genitalia.
—Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
I think I’ll take a bath so I can have a faucet orgasm.
—Jay McInerney, Story of My Life
Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one does not melt in one’s bath.
—Pablo Picasso
Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.
—Delmore Schwartz, “Existentialism: The Inside Story”
I have had a good many more uplifting thoughts, creative and expansive visions—while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers—in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral.
—Edmund Wilson, A Piece of My Mind
You can tell a lot from a person’s nails. When a life starts to unravel, they’re among the first to go.
—Ian McEwan, Saturday
[Anna Wintour] wanted to work for Interview, but … I don’t think she knows how to dress, she’s actually a terrible dresser.
—Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries
Nuclear Wintour.
—Tabloid nickname
If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
—Peter Ustinov, in The Observer
Don’t read women’s magazines. They’re bad for your stomach.
—Kate Tempest, “These Things I Know”
The magazines pile up and die.
The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
—Charles Lamb
Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
—Thomas Pynchon, V
God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they’re not really interested in.
—Bertrand Russell
Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
—David Foster Wallace
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you. Otherwise they call you arrogant.
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You must decide to drink wine in quantity.
—Kingsley Amis, On Drink
Isn’t it amazing … how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?
—John Updike, “Gesturing”
Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.
—Graham Greene, The Comedians
Let’s shuck an obligation.
—John Berryman, “Dream Song 82: Op. posth. no. 5”
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
—Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
—Evelyn Waugh
The chronically unpunctual should cancel all engagements for a definite period.
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.
—Cole Porter, “Miss Otis Regrets”
I don’t mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny.
—Lucia Berlin, “Silence”
It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.
—Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest.
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
And so we “bluff” … We all do it. Let us despise ourselves for doing it, but not one another.
—Max Beerbohm, The Prince of Minor Writers
I wonder whether all my ironies aren’t simply one more way of sucking up to the ruling class.
—Mary-Kay Wilmers, Human Relations and Other Difficulties
Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.
—George Saunders
It’s the hardest addiction of all … Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony.
—Edward St. Aubyn, At Last
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
—Harold Bloom, Paris Review interview
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers. I think they don’t stifle enough of them.
—Flannery O’Connor, interview
Call me a science fiction writer. I’ll come to your house and I’ll nail
your pet’s head to a coffee table.
—Harlan Ellison, according to his New York Times obituary
I wouldn’t leave him with enough teeth to pronounce “smutty.”
—John D. MacDonald, on the man who called him a smutty book writer
It’s always the worst people who happen to burst in on you when you are in misery.
—Muriel Spark, A Good Comb
The grand never-knocker.
—Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
Damn we were lonely people, the two of us.
—Jonathan Miles, Dear American Airlines
Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept. In Mexico City, if you’re the only person on a bus and someone gets on they’ll not only come next to you, they will lean against you.
—Lucia Berlin, “Fool to Cry”
I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls.
—Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
When you’re alone like he was alone …
—T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes
The frying pan’s too wide.
—Joni Mitchell, on loneliness, “My Old Man”
Nuts to the educational value of suffering.
—Robert Christgau, Going into the City
How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books?
Abandonitis.
—Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
How good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in.
—Nikki Giovanni, “Nikki-Rosa”
When the Caliph Omar destroyed the libraries of Alexandria he is supposed to have kept the public baths warm for eighteen days with burning manuscripts.
—George Orwell, As I Please, 1943–1946
The book-bed-bath defense system.
—Cyril Connolly, on warding off depression, The Unquiet Grave
That’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.
—Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”
—Girls now, they wear leggings. As pants. It’s embarrassing.
—Just parading their coochies around town.
—Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter
Melodrama crouches upon the brim of his sombrero.
—Max Beerbohm, The Works of Max Beerbohm
Oh my god! Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard.
—John Berryman
There is one fascinating view which maintains that all the mystery is utterly clarified if we suppose that everyone is roaring drunk.
—Delmore Schwartz, on Hamlet, in The Ego Is Always at the Wheel: Bagatelles
The way to see the world was to see it drunk. Everything was created to be seen drunk.
—Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
Did you often stagger into the middle of busy intersections with your gummy eyes and make comical, drunken attempts to direct traffic?
—Charles Portis, The Masters of Atlantis
The gibbous moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
—John Fowles, The Magus
Nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the moon had been made with a ladder of bones.
—Michael Chabon, Moonglow
If Gus Grissom had had a heart attack on the moon, nobody in the whole world would be able to look up into the sky with the same awe and wonder as before.
—Joy Williams, “Summer”
He was like the bed at a party on which they pile the coats.
—George Saunders, Tenth of December
They treated me like an open manhole.
—Ring Lardner, “Ex Parte”
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
—John Clare, “I Am!”
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
—George Orwell, As I Please, 1943–1946
Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.
—Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
If you didn’t write, I’d only get mail from the IRS.
—Breece D’J Pancake, in A Room Forever
I really wish that I were dead.
—Frederick Nietzsche, “Song of a Theocritean Goatherd”
—How many staffers does it take to change a light bulb at Time, Inc.?
—Twenty-five. One to screw in the bulb, and twenty-four to stand around talking about how great the old bulb used to be.
—Terry McDonell, The Accidental Life
Only the Brits can think the right level of malignant thoughts a magazine requires.
—Robert Hughes, in Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries
Never lose your sense of the superficial.
—Lord Northcliffe’s advice for tabloid journalists
It was a gimmick—everything is, and if it isn’t, that’s its gimmick.
—Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
Lists are a form of cultural hysteria.
—Don DeLillo, Paris Review interview
Lists are a form of power.
—A. S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden
Christ! What are patterns for?
—Amy Lowell, “Patterns”
Every man who swaggers is fraudulent.
—Norman Mailer
All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.
—John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By
My knuckles? Well dragged.
—Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor
Who wants to read about another nifty guy at loose ends?
—Jim Harrison, Paris Review interview
I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.
—Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
This holy radionovela brought to you by Female Sadness Incorporated.
—Juliana Delgado Lopera, Fiebre Tropical
Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.
—Thelma Ritter, in All About Eve
You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.
—Donald Barthelme, “A Shower of Gold”
I think I am going to be an adventuress, I said. Is it all right?
—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Everything’s weird if you look long enough.
—Sam Lipsyte, “The Dungeon Master”
The rewards for being sane may not be very many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them.
—Kingsley Amis, Stanley and the Women
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I am not the fig plucker but the fig plucker’s son, and I can pluck figs until the fig plucker comes.
—Collegiate graffiti
Naturally there is no known rejoinder to this.
—William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
—Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
There’s no such thing as a joke.
—Joe Orton
Nothing’s a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
—Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories
Does my carbon footprint look big in this?
—Laura Freeman, in The Spectato
r
Madame, this is a restaurant, not a meadow.
—Waiter to Greta Garbo, in Ninotchka, after she orders raw carrots and beets for lunch
I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.
—Joy Williams, “Shepherd”
The best choice is always the restaurant fifteen minutes further than you are willing to go.
—Jonathan Gold
If you would ask the waiter to bring a fairly sharp knife, I could cut off a nice little block of the atmosphere, to take home with me.
—Dorothy Parker, “Just a Little One”
That cult of the belly, I say, breeds wind.
—Gustave Flaubert
What if we just went home and read books to each other?
—Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
People with no upper-body strength, who read poetry. These are my people.
—Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
No restaurants. The means of consoling oneself: reading cookbooks.
—Baudelaire
Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal
In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
—Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity”
Every man has a right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.
—Leon Trotsky, on Dwight Macdonald
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
—Alice Munro, “The Beggar Maid”
Just because people love your mind,
Doesn’t mean they have to love your body, too.
—Richard Brautigan, Rommel Drives on Deep in Egypt
Stephanie, I want to ask you something, all right? Do you think that I am either interesting or intelligent?
—John Travolta, in Saturday Night Fever
Except for socially, you’re my role model.
—Joan Cusack, to Holly Hunter, in Broadcast News
When you’re really cute that’s all you have to be, you make a career out of it. Someone asks you what you do, you say, “Nothing. I’m cute.”
—Elmore Leonard, Killshot
Whatever you do, ya’ gotta be sexy.
—Dr. John
Maybe I have Attention Surplus Disorder.
—Susan Sontag, Paris Review interview
People always know more than I do, but what I know I know.
—Richard Ford, in The Guardian
My 60-watt lighted head.
—Sylvia Plath, Journals
I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.
—Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America