—Joke in Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters
The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.
—Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels … or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet.
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.
—Henry Miller, Black Spring
If I need any shit from you, I’ll squeeze your head.
—Kris Kristofferson, to Jon Peters
What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.
—Diane Johnson, Natural Opium
That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain.
—Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
Saigon. Shit.
—Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now
I was ready to infiltrate Hanoi, grab Uncle Ho by the goatee, pull off his face, and make a clean escape.
—Thom Jones, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE.
—Robert Benchley, telegram from Venice
Fuck them for getting to live in a place like this.
—Garth Greenwell, on Venice, Cleanness
That profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine.
—Seymour Krim, on his memory, Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim
Closing the bodega down for real.
—Cy Twombly, on death, in Sally Mann’s Hold Still
Disintegration—I’m taking it in stride.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
I am so half an orange without you.
—Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
They are very nice to eat, oranges, when you’ve been having sex for ages. They cut through the fug and smell very organised.
—Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond
—Mother, how many pips in a tangerine?
—Shut up, you little bastard.
—Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters
Is there a nemesis in the house?
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.
—William S. Burroughs
—There are so few areas of transcendence left.
—Don’t forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others.
—Robert Jay Lifton and Christopher Hitchens
People seldom read a book which is given to them.
—Samuel Johnson
I turned another page in the book although I hadn’t read the previous one.
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has never seen the ocean.
—Walter Bagehot
Life is slow suicide, unless you read.
—Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
—W. H. Auden
There are no nineteenth century ballads about being gay.
—Colm Tóibín
Relax, Amy, I’m not gay … I just like Sleater-Kinney.
—Emily Gould, Friendship
Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t make me any less American than Jesse Helms.
—Allen Ginsberg
You can’t work in a haberdashery in the sticks without knowing what a fairy is.
—Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume One
I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn.
That Bridge was just too much for me.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
Is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?
—Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical and nude?
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Your gross body my favorite song.
—Danez Smith, “Acknowledgments”
The naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one.
—Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library
You were naked. I’m a sucker for the first person singular.
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
Man, there she stood without her anthropology on!
—Ralph Ellison, The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison
More of this sitting around like beasts!
—W. H. Auden
I have a lifelong horror of sandy beaches.
—Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory
—You know what people who go to nude beaches look like?
—Tell me.
—People who shouldn’t go to nude beaches.
—Elmore Leonard, Be Cool
Who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself?
—Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, journals
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
—H. L. Mencken
Bones heal, pain is temporary and chicks dig scars.
—Evel Knievel, attributed
I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.
—J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
White people eat cheese for breakfast and smell of it all day.
—Aravind Adiga, Selection Day
Fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores, and, and molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains.
—Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
No wine, she said. It leads to cheese.
—Lorrie Moore, Bark
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
—H. L. Mencken
The old ultra-violence.
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Oh, I’m not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.
—Tom Waits
Things mount up inside one, and then one has to perpetrate an outrage.
—Muriel Spark, Robinson
Don’t confuse honors with achievement.
—Zadie Smith
Literature has nothing to do with national prizes and everything to do with a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
—Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses
Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
—Jean Cocteau, attributed
Prizes are for parents so they’ll know.
—Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters
Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.
—Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From
If you’re ever angry enough to hit somebody, don’t do it. Cool down and get yourself a pistol.
—Elmore Leonard, Maximum Bob
You know, there’s a distinct lack of female arms dealers, I’ve always thought.
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
Guns … were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound.
—Lorrie Moore, Like Life
I am a bullet, being shot out of a dirty gun.
—Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
She was already a missile, armed and targeted.
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
The vote … means nothing to women, we should be armed.
—Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls
Every woman should have a blowtorch.
—Julia Child, attributed
Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba.
—John Ruskin
As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so much as a piece of toast.
—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
I think women admire Marlene Dietrich so much because she looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast.
—Angela Carter
Come out, my eight-slice beauty.
—Ann Beattie, on a toaster given as a Christmas gift, The Burning House
Mother doesn’t cook, Ignatius said dogmatically. She burns.
—John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Her favourite food is anything burnt.
—Ali Smith, Spring
Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.
—Paul Beatty, The Sellout
—George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum
I’m as American as apple pie. But no. I cannot, simply cannot, don a mask and suck the c— of that sweet, secure bitch, middle-class American life.
—Charles Wright, The Messenger
Just one hog ass thing after the other.
—Albert Murray, on being black, The Omni-Americans
He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.
—Benjamin Franklin
In victory you deserve champagne. In defeat you need it.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, attributed
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it.
—Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage
A well-minxed martini.
—Kevin Young, “The Suspects”
No martini, no lecture.
—Dean Acheson, warning to the Brookings Institution
A young girl’s voice. She is dressed in a nun’s habit. The boy turns and faces her. She proffers a chalice of cervical exudate and he drinks from it.
—Nick Tosches, start of a review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, in Rolling Stone
Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.
—Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Oh, man, this is wyrd.
—N. Scott Momaday, “Death Comes for Beowulf”
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
—Wendell Berry
There’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough.
—Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
Canadians. Grrr!
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
Canadians, do not vomit on me!
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights
I dreamed that I threw up a fox.
—Joy Williams, “The Visiting Privilege”
Puking overboard to feed the herrings.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
—Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?
—No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.
—Art Spiegelman, interview about Maus
There is no more beautiful a sight, he said, than to see a fine woman bashing away at a typewriter.
—Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Teabags, Tampax and the TLS.
—Angela Carter’s description of Lorna Sage’s house
She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for a dandy a century ago.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.
—Charlotte Brontë
Just because I’m so wretchedly plain doesn’t mean I can do without things.
—William Trevor, “Flights of Fancy”
Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.
—Katharine Hepburn, attributed
Why was “plain” a euphemism for “ugly”?
—Elif Batuman, The Idiot
You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.
—Anthony Trollope, The Warden
I may look like a beer salesman, but I’m a poet.
—Theodore Roethke
Any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can be expected to be called a rat about three times a year.
—Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
The January issue is suddenly so full of people with bald heads, I had to kill three of them today.
—Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries
Head shaved clean as a porn star’s testicle.
—Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
You must not mind me, madam; I say strange things, but I mean no harm.
—Samuel Johnson
If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you.
—Rita Dove, “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved”
—I’ve got an FFF inside.
—What’s that, sir?
—A fucking funny feeling.
—Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
That’s what being alive’s all about, all those fucked up feelings. You’ve got to have them; when you stop, watch out.
—Irvine Welsh, The Acid House
Forgetting that one should never answer the telephone in a dream, I take a call.
—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought
Who hasn’t woken up screaming in a four-poster elephant herd?
Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.
—Anna Kavan, Ice
A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.
—Toni Morrison, Love
If you’re sad or heartbroken, make yourself up, dress up, add more lipstick and attack.
—Coco Chanel, attributed
He did secretly pine for an extra dictionary “label”: namely, illit., to go with colloq. and derog. and the rest.
—Martin Amis, on Kingsley Amis, The Rub of Time
This erratum slip has been inserted by mistake.
—Alasdair Gray, Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Don’t cite dictionaries to me … Dictionary people consult me, not I them.
—John O’Hara
Folks don’t necessarily have to be able to use all them big dictionary words to understand life.
—Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place
He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary.
—William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
—Ernest Hemingway, on William Faulkner
There ain’t a woman in the world who ain’t a fool for a talking bit.
—Record producer Billy Sherrill, to Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink
Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
When Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s, it sounded as if his teeth had been ground down to points.
—Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and
grinders.
—Walter Bagehot
All my clothes had holes in them from where the sensors had been attached.
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
A hole in your sock may have just occurred; not so with a darn.
—Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters
Wind, rain, work, and mockery were his tailors.
—Walker Evans, on James Agee
—Lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.
—Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.
—P. G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”
Fashion is about long black cars when you need them.
—Liz Tilberis
What I like about limousines is that they have tinted windows, so no-one can see if you’re snogging in the back seat.
—Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Trojans never did any harm to me.
—Achilles, in Homer’s The Iliad
I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.
—Muhammad Ali
I would give all my profound Greek to dance really well.
—Virginia Woolf
God match me with a good dancer!
—William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Verily thou shakest a wicked ankle.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
What man would not be a dancer if he could.
—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
I have actually been written up in columns as “the best dancer among the literati.”
—John O’Hara, Selected Letters of John O’Hara
The body says what words cannot.
—Martha Graham
I’m so afraid she’s going to give birth to a cube on stage.
—Stark Young, on Martha Graham
Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
—H. P. Lovecraft
He who fusses about a mosquito net can never hope to dance with a goat.
—Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party
I will gnat sleep in that room again.
—Elizabeth Barrett, diary
—I get out of bed and throw up and take a shower and shave and have breakfast.
—You throw up every morning?
—Of course, doesn’t everyone?
—E. J. Kahn, in conversation with a surprised Brendan Gill
The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
He resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.