you had was years ago.
—Richard Hugo, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”
Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Under what circumstances can you imagine sleeping with me? Global apocalypse? National pandemic?
—Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
One test of un homme sérieux is that it is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him.
—Christopher Hitchens, And Yet
The basic ecology of literary life [is] that if you are not sometimes attacked, then you cannot be very good.
—John Gregory Dunne, Crooning
If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing.
—Kingsley Amis
Try me, you post-print punk.
—John Updike, Bech Is Back
—I’m reviewing it, the stooped man said, and started to plod off.
—You read it?
—No, he said over his shoulder, but I know the son of a bitch who wrote it.
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Precancer?… Isn’t that … like life?
—Lorrie Moore, Like Life
In fiction, it’s never benign.
—Rebecca Schiff, The Bed Moved
The orchestra was just finishing the formless waltz of the syphilitic prostitute.
—Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy
The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat.
—James Merrill, “The Victor Dog”
You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that?
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Do you try to listen to classical music but feel you don’t ever really advance past knowing it’s better than it sounds?
—Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood
Take deads
Away.
Play music
Please.
—J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
The thing that stood between me and murder was always a buzzsaw guitar.
—Donna Gaines, A Misfit’s Manifesto
We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.
—Don DeLillo, Paris Review interview
How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two
A brown condom full of walnuts.
—Clive James, describing Arnold Schwarzenegger
If we are to be fried alive, it seems funny to be working out.
—Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries 1960–1969
Does breakfast in bed count as a morning workout?
—Elizabeth Jane Howard
Caffeine was my exercise.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Intellectual arses wobble the best.
—Harold Pinter, Mountain Language
Fleas dream about buying a dog.
—Eduardo Galeano, Border Crossing
When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
—Edward Abbey, attributed
If you are totally alone I suppose it’s quite a comfort to have a dumb friend lurking.
—William Rushton, Super Pig
Think about this. All the little animals of your youth are long dead.
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
Critical essays are really where it’s at.
—Jim Morrison
I can’t read any more of this Rich Critical Prose, he growled, broke wind, and scratched himself & left that fragrant area.
—John Berryman, “Dream Song 170”
Be light, stinging, insolent, and melancholy.
—Words hanging over Kenneth Tynan’s desk
So much thought about everything appears in the form of literary criticism.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995
Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it.
—Jean Cocteau
Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable.
—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
Let me give you my feedback. My feedback is arf arf arf.
—Chelsey Minnis, “Nerves”
Here is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have furnished ourselves with orifices.
—Rose Macaulay, “Eating and Drinking”
Can I get more orifices?… The three on offer aren’t enough to sustain a marriage.
—Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper
—Angela Carter, letter
Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.
—Emily Dickinson
If this was love, love had been overrated.
—Henry James, The Europeans
I am crazy about being drunk. I like it like Patton liked war.
—James Dickey
I got deflowered on two cans of Rainier Ale when I was 17 … I began to wonder what else there was out there that was like Rainier Ale.
—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
My dad was the town drunk. Usually that’s not so bad, but New York City?
—Henny Youngman
Turn on, tune in, drop out, fuck up, crawl back.
—Grover Lewis
I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
I’m partial to anyone who looks half blind.
—Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan
I love to read the way people love to watch television.
—Susan Sontag, Rolling Stone interview
I enjoy vegetarian food the way I enjoy a kick in the stomach.
—Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses
There is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.
—Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Eating celery like crazy, because someone said Kinsey discovered it was the only thing for potency.
—Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries 1960–1969
The only thing that I hate more intensely than melodrama and spinach is myself.
—Saul Bellow, Letters
We don’t want nutrition, we want taste.
—Alice B. Toklas, attributed
People feel so special, so wise, when somebody they know drops dead.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World
I have certainly rounded third base and am headed for home plate, which is a hole in the ground.
—Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
Don’t grieve for the dead: they know what they’re doing.
—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him.
—Toni Morrison, Sula
I don’t fuck white guys, but if I had to fuck a white guy, I’d fuck you.
—Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY.
—Coffee mug in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift
We must always be on guard against mediocre cussing in our writing.
—Katherine Dunn, On Cussing
Let’s get in the same racket.
The racket is dirty talk.
—Chelsey Minnis, “Larceny”
I flat ran over Dreamer Tatum, cunt on cunt.
—Dan Jenkins, Semi-Tough
Some girl who got around started calling me “Wondercunt.”
—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
The best time to drink champa
gne is before lunch, you cunt.
—Harold Pinter, No Man’s Land
The cold cunt of reality.
—Charles Wright, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About
Better to have been a dickhead and seen it,
than be a cunt all your life and not know it.
—Kate Tempest, “These things I know”
Russell Ash found a whole family of Cunts living in England in the nineteenth century.
—Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex
He paces up and down like one of those fuckin Inspector Morse type of cunts.
—Irvine Welsh, Filth
I walked over and started grabbing at cheese, pickled-pigs’ feet and chicken cunt.
—Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
Fucking, cunting, bloody good.
—Philip Larkin, on Sidney Bechet’s music
I like how shocked people are when you say “cunt.” It’s like I have a nuclear bomb in my underpants.
—Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Shall we go to the cunt?
—Lady Caroline Blackwood, speaking of the country
In certain trying circumstances … profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
—Mark Twain
My message to the world is Fuck it!
—John O’Hara, 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell.
—Anna Burns, Milkman
Fuck humanity, was my basic position at that point.
—Hari Kunzru, White Tears
The sky is low—the clouds are mean.
—Emily Dickinson
Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.
—Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
Don’t say what you would or wouldn’t do, honey. Cause one day you might have to.
—Larry Brown, Fay
Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand.
—Toni Morrison, Sula
If you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.
—David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
And you told me I wouldn’t need my arse helmet.
—Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Málaga.
—Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
You have played enough; you have eaten and drunk enough. It’s time you went home.
—Horace
Go—and never darken my towels again.
—Groucho Marx, in Duck Soup
Superior people never make long visits.
—Marianne Moore, “Silence”
Your back is my favorite part of you,
the part furthest away from your mouth.
—Louise Glück, “Purple Bathing Suit”
You must come again when you have less time.
—Walter Sickert
My daughter says to her friends “a mother is someone who types all day.”
—Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
No one can write with a child around.
—Doris Lessing
I used to not be able to work if there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink.
—Anne Lamott
If Anything Will Level with You Water Will.
—A. R. Ammons, poem title
Swimming, like dying, seems to solve all problems: and you remain alive.
—Iris Murdoch
I took the lake between my legs.
—Maxine Kumin, “Morning Swim”
To care for the quarrels of the past … is rare in America.
—Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
The United States of Amnesia.
—Gore Vidal
This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.
—Don DeLillo, Libra
There are fuckers and fuckees.
—John Lennon
The Archangel took his role of fucker seriously.
—Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers.
—Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
Everyone is in the best seat.
—John Cage
Seat all the bores together … They don’t realize they’re the bores, and they’re happy.
—Lady Elizabeth Anson
The “gristle” seat.
—Sally Quinn, on the seat between two bores, The Party
I ask the gentleman on my right, Are you a bed-wetter? And when we have exhausted that, I remark to the gentleman on my left, You know, I spit blood this morning.
—Virginia Faulkner, on dealing with bores
Do you like string?
—Jerry Wadsworth, final attempt to elicit a response from a dull dinner partner
Did you know you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?
—Elisa Gabbert, “New Theories on Boredom”
I want one Falstaff for every Hal.
—Tina Brown, on dinner parties, The Vanity Fair Diaries
It wasn’t clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.
—Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
Self-knowledge is always bad news.
—John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
A Hong Kong meal … is a statement to which customers are secondary.
—Food writer quoted by Kingsley Amis
I know that sort of meal, and the statement is Fuck You, and you haven’t got to go to Hong Kong for it. Soho is far enough.
—Kingsley Amis, in reply
Thank you for your invitation to host a fundraising dinner in the private room of a top London restaurant. I would rather die.
—Harold Pinter
I say as Epicurus said, that a man should not so much respect what he eateth, as with whom he eateth.
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Another big eater was Chou Yi-han of Changchow, who fried a ghost.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before.
—Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life
You ever cook any Devil brains yourself? Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.
—R. A. Lafferty, Past Master
I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Oh, Jesus, female sexuality is a cruel cross to bear!
—Angela Carter, journal
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.
—Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Which flight had he been on? the red eye or brown nose?
—Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers
He has a morbid fear of missing airplanes, and of being dropped from the tail-end lavatory.
—John Updike, Bech: A Book
The cry of an angel falling backward through an open window.
—Dwight Yoakam, on Roy Orbison’s voice
A friend of mine once observed that you could recognize a Katz if it fell out of an airplane at 30,000 feet.
—David Salle, on Alex Katz, How to See
Bring me the sunset in a cup.
—Emily Dickinson
That sunburnt feeling is moving inside of me, like light breaking in double time over the crops.
—Greg Jackson, on bourbon, Prodigals
I don’t like an empty house at sunset.
—Ann Fleming
I don’t know any writers who don’t drink.
—James Baldwin
Nurse … you h
ave a lovely pitching arm.
—Said to a bartender in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
—Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?
—Someone who liked fucking corpses.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
We are low on marmalade.
—Last words of Lord Grimthorpe
Publishers needed favorable reviews … as an Easter basket needs shredded green paper.
—Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Both Lizzieites and anti-Lizzieites were disposed to think that Lizzie was very clever.
—Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.
—Dylan Thomas, blurbing Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
It had never occurred to me that book reviews might be written week after week chiefly in order to make the reading of books unnecessary.
—Delmore Schwartz, “An Author’s Brother-in-Law”
To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect—and everybody knows it.
—Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer
Giddy chorus girls just waiting to be fucked.
—Alan Bennett, on too-nice theater critics, in The Guardian
I still get a thrill every time the curtain goes up.
—Kenneth Tynan
I get a thrill every time it goes down.
—Clive James, on why he never wrote theater criticism
There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.
—Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express
God, humans are a noisy zoo—
especially educated ones armed with vin rouge
and an incomprehensible no-act play.
—Rita Dove, “Persephone in Hell”
—How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
—I don’t know. I left early.
—Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
—Randall Jarrell, “Next Day”
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
It’s very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.
—Harold Pinter, interview
No one ever tells you the truth about what you look like.
—Rachel Cusk, Transit
—My sister has just returned from a week’s holiday in Paris, and, do you know, she didn’t go to the Louvre once.
—Good lord, change of food, I expect.