Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature.
—John Berryman, “Dream Song #14”
There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
I don’t want to sound like a misanthrope, but there’s something wrong with us.
—Ishmael Reed, Paris Review interview
She felt that she was feeding something inside her that belonged in a pen in the zoo.
—Joy Williams, “Winter Chemistry”
Do as I do. Break with the outside world, live like a bear.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857
Boxing makes you want to eat, but eating does not make you want to box.
—A. J. Liebling, Between Meals
I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don’t fight, I’ll eat this planet.
—George Foreman
I hate life. There: I have said it; I’ll not take it back.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Pessimism does win us great happy moments.
—Max Beerbohm, The Prince of Minor Writers
I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt.
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
My anger subsides, I’d like to pee.
—Samuel Beckett, Endgame
There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Once you had pissed in the sink of your bathless double you belonged to the fallen world around you.
—Robert Stone
Male urination is a form of commentary.
—Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
—H. L. Mencken, letter to Theodore Dreiser
Catch your first morning urine in your hands
and splash it on that rash.
—Poison ivy cure in Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “talk radio, d.c.”
I’m ready to fall in love with life.
I’m ready to drink her pee.
I’ll take a shower after.
—Frederick Seidel, “Too Much”
I think about you when I go to the bathroom.
—Martha Plimpton, to River Phoenix, in The Mosquito Coast
I think about you so much, I forget to use the bathroom.
—Seymour Cassel, to Gena Rowlands, in Minnie and Moskowitz
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.
—Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish.
—Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
—Evelyn Waugh
Cultural allusions?—forget it. You can’t assume the audience knows anything beyond the latest thong-snappings in the supermarket tabloids.
—James Wolcott, Critical Mass
That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
—Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me
Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.
—James Fenton, in The Times (London)
The itch of a lost quotation in a book you cannot find.
—Hannah Sullivan, “The Sandpit After Rain”
Of course you don’t like all the aphorisms. I don’t like all of you.
—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought
I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo.
—Lucia Perillo, “Urban Legend”
That upsweeping electric hair is the poet’s helmet, his rooster comb.
—Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin’s Journals
Gimme an upsweep, Minnie,
With humpteen baby curls.
—Gwendolyn Brooks, “at the hairdresser’s”
Smile like a hairdresser
Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.
—Charles Simic, “O Spring”
—What do you call Khrushchev’s hairdo?
—Harvest of 1963.
—Joke in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty
Darling, I was going to ask you, what happened to it? You could have fought back. Or did they give you an anesthetic?
—Malcolm Bradbury, on a haircut, Eating People Is Wrong
It is impossible to be angry for very long with a man who wears a wig.
—Auberon Waugh, Diaries of Auberon Waugh
I’d go and get my hair cut, I was so lonely for some fingers.
—Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Others
The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., A Man Without a Country
Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.
—David Markson, Reader’s Block
After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.
—Chinese proverb
Nothing beats sitting around in the daytime with a novel on your lap and—truthfully—telling yourself you’re working.
—Kingsley Amis, “Report on a Fiction Prize”
The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel
Novels are crazy!
—Robert Menasse, The Capital
When we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
I wish one could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers.
—James Schuyler, “February 13, 1975”
Make yourself at home, Frank—hit somebody.
—Don Rickles, to Frank Sinatra, on The Tonight Show
It is perfectly all right to cast the first stone,
if you have some more in your pocket.
—Bob Kaufman, “Heavy Water Blues”
Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.
—Alan Brien, in Punch
Come closer, boys. It will be easier for you.
—Erskine Childers, while facing a firing squad
What a remarkable anthology one could make of pieces of writing describing executions!
—George Orwell, As I Please, 1943–1946
If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?
—Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light
Here is the Strangler, reading the Kenyon Review! Good luck to you, Strangler!
—Kenneth Koch, “Fresh Air”
The bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
Sometimes luck is a splash of mud from an oncoming bus.
—Elizabeth Jane Howard, Mr. Wrong
The reams
of shit I’ve read.
—James Schuyler, “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
—Tom Stoppard
Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
—Patricia Highsmith
Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tr
icks.
—Lorrie Moore, Like Life
We’ve gotten along. We’ve never felt like congratulating ourselves.
—Denis Johnson, on a long marriage, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
—Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
One can’t explain one’s marriage.
—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Against all odds, honey, we’re the big door prize.
—John Prine, “In Spite of Ourselves” (duet with Iris Dement)
I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.
—Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right
The night he and Kate married, Kate’s cousin Freeman had wired a cowbell to their bedsprings.
—Prank described in Donald Hall’s A Carnival of Losses
Blush like you mean it.
—Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
The blush: what evolutionary advantage do we gain in the publication of our embarrassment?
—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought
The squandermania of the thing.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
The airport bookstores did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
The tin bird whoofed down the runway and lifted sharply, while everybody played the habitual game of total indifference which hides the shallow breathing and contracted sphincters of the Air Age.
—John D. MacDonald, Dress Her in Indigo
I do not get on airplanes unless I’m profoundly drunk.
—Harry Crews, letter
We’re in the clouds, people! This can’t last!
—Sarah Hepola, Blackout
Turn your air vents to full, people!
—Nicholson Baker, on how to keep a crashing plane aloft, Room Temperature
Icelandic Air was known by everyone to offer the best bargains in the skies, if glimpses of the red-hot engine parts didn’t put you off.
—David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper
Tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal.
—Lorrie Moore, Like Life
I’m always very happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.
—Gabriel García Márquez
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
—H. L. Mencken, attributed
The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc.; the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.
—Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labor
—Samuel R. Delany
I wish I was Bill Murray. I hope everything I’ve read about evolution is wrong, and I eventually evolve into him.
—Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
We have art in order to not die of the truth.
—Frederick Nietzsche
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella.
—Mario Vargas Llosa
Your shit is in the pan, about to get deep-fried.
—Erika Ellis, good fences
When you’re in the shit up to your neck, there’s nothing left to do but sing.
—Samuel Beckett
Messy, isn’t it?
—Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout
Bills are easier to pay when short ribs are braising in the oven.
—Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman’s How to Braise
Like ribs you are better
the day after, when all
is forgiven.
—Kevin Young, “Ode to Greens”
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
One way of measuring a life—maybe as good a method as any other—is on the basis of how much peculiarity you have helped to generate.
—Ernest Gaines, in Terry McDonell’s The Accidental Life
Let me say it plainly: our true projects have finally been ourselves.
—Seymour Krim, What’s This Cat’s Story?
Life itself is the proper binge.
—Julia Child, in Time magazine
Life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars’ worth of euphoria go the distance.
—Stanley Elkin
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It
And a hot-cha-cha.
—P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster Sees Through It
Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We’re going to show you our new step!
—Samuel R. Delany, Nova
I don’t get much sun lately, Dwight said.
—Denis Johnson, Angels
Dwight was tired.
—Joy Williams, “Rot”
Dwight thinks with his typewriter.
—Paul Goodman, on Dwight Macdonald
At least Dwight manned up for a few seconds.
—Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
The ending should fall off the tree like a ripe pear.
—Andrew Lytle, letter to Harry Crews
Was that it?
Was that it?
Was that it?
That was it.
—Howard Nemerov, “A Life”
It was getting late and we each had to find our people.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer
We’re all just walking each other home.
—Baba Ram Dass
Thanks for coming. Thanks for showing up, too.
—Bette Midler, attributed
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to John Stinson, rare book dealer and cheerful misanthrope, for a thousand lessons in the literature of absurdity, parody, dissent, and disturbance. Thanks to Jonathan Miles, John Williams, Sam Tanenhaus, Max Watman, Charles Taylor, David Orr, Julie Truax, and Charles Truax, who commented on early drafts of this manuscript. Thanks to Daniel Okrent for several choice lines from his own commonplace book. Thanks to Penn Garner LeFavour and Harriet Garner LeFavour, my kids, who pitched in mightily during a fact-checking crunch on this book. (Any remaining errors are my own.) Thanks to the New York Public Library and Joe N’ Throw coffee shop in Fairmont, West Virginia, where a great deal of this material was stitched together. Thanks to David McCormick, my debonair agent. Thanks to Stig Abell and Rozalind Dineen of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), which published an early selection of this material. Thanks also to James Bennet and Brian Zittel of the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, which printed another selection of this material. Thanks to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who understood this project from the moment I mentioned it to him. Thanks to Rodrigo Corral for his bold and elegant cover design. Thanks also, at FSG, to Jeff Seroy, Chloe Texier-Rose, Brianna Panzica, Richard Oriolo, and Katharine Liptak.
Thanks finally to Cree LeFavour, for everything.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abbey, Edward
Abbott, Berenice
Acheson, Dean
Aciman, André
Acker, Kathy
Acosta, Oscar Zeta
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Adiga, Aravind
Adler, Renata
Agee, James
Ai
Albee, Edward
Albertine, Viv
Aldrin, Buzz
Alexander, Elizabeth
Ali, Muhammad
Allman, Gregg
Amis, Kingsley
Amis, Martin
Ammons, A. R.
Angell, Roger
Anson, Lady Elizabeth
Antrim, Donald
Artaud, Antonin
Ashley, Leonard R. N.
Atwood, Margaret
Auden, W. H.
Austen, Jane
Autumn, Emilie
Avedon, Richard
Babitz, Eve
Bachmann, Ingeborg
Bagehot, Walter
Bainbridge, Beryl
Baker, Nicholson
Baldwin, James
Balfour, Arthur
Ballard, J. G.
Bambara, Toni Cade
Bangs, Lester
Bankhead, Tallulah
Baraka, Amiri
Barker, Pat
Barnes, Julian
Barr, Ann
Barrett, Elizabeth
Barry, Kevin
Barrymore, John
Barth, John
Barthelme, Donald
Barthes, Roland
Baruch, Bernard
Bass, Rick
Bates, Kathy
Batuman, Elif
Baudelaire
Baudrillard, Jean
Beard, James
Beatles
Beattie, Ann
Beatty, Paul
Bechdel, Alison
Beckett, Samuel
Beerbohm, Max
Bell, Francesca
Bellow, Saul
Benchley, Robert
Benjamin, Walter
Bennett, Alan
Bennett, Arnold
Bennett, Claire-Louise
Benson, Tish
Benton, Thomas Hart
Bergstrom, Carl T.
Berlin, Isaiah
Berlin, Lucia
Berlinski, Mischa
Berry, Chuck
Berry, Wendell
Berryman, John
Betjeman, John
Bierce, Ambrose
Biko, Steve
Bishop, Elizabeth
Blackwood, Lady Caroline
Blais, Madeleine
Blank, Les
Bloch, Robert
Bloom, Harold
Blount, Roy, Jr.
Bogart, Humphrey
Bolaño, Roberto
Bolt, Robert
Boorstin, Daniel J.
Booth, Stanley
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Bosworth, Patricia
Bouton, Jim
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros
Bowen, Elizabeth