The average person who wears a bow tie is distrusted by almost everyone.
—John T. Molloy
We melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams.
—Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur
The thin red jellies within you or within me.
—Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
Ah, those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
—Jean Genet, Querelle
What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window?… Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go!
—Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women
I do give sublime blow jobs. I think I will have my mouth insured by Lloyd’s of London.
—Gael Greene, Blue Skies, No Candy
Everybody thinks they’re good at sucking dick but they’re not, usually.
—Garth Greenwell, Cleanness
It really bothered him that I didn’t swallow. I said to him, Are you crazy? That shit is alive.
—Sigrid Nunez, Naked Sleeper
Trying out the bad banana taste of Durex on your tongue.
—Hannah Sullivan, “You, Very Young in New York”
When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself
—Lucia Perillo, “Again, the Body”
Let’s hate each other with our minds, not our bodies!
—Chelsey Minnis, “Depression”
It is a rule of Shakespeare production that men who eat grapes are definitely voluptuaries and probably murderers.
—Kenneth Tynan, Right and Left
Lord, let me eat more fruit
than comes in a mixed drink.
—Kevin Young, “Sleepwalking Psalms”
I pick twenty [cherries] at a time and stuff them all into my mouth at once. They taste better like that.
—Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
I don’t think I ever had a cherry. If I did, it got shoved so far back I was usin’ it for a tail-light.
—Dolly Parton, in Rolling Stone
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!
Aisles full of husbands!
—Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
Debauchee of dew.
—Emily Dickinson
[He] would rather fuck a prominent girl than a pretty one.
—Wolcott Gibbs, on a New Yorker colleague
Civilisation meant good company and going to bed with anyone you liked.
—Kenneth Clark’s synopsis of Clive Bell’s Civilisation
What I am saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America.
—Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Real artists are not nice people; all their best feelings go into their work, and life has the residue.
—W. H. Auden
Don’t confuse the monster on the page with the monster here in front of you.
—Donald Barthelme
A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
—Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”
It’s not nice; it’s art.
—Bertolt Brecht
I had seen enough of fashionable society to know that it is there that one finds real illiteracy and not, let us say, among electricians.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
I think that a garbage collector is as sensitive as any author.
—J. P. Donleavy, Paris Review interview
I … would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can.
—Chuck Berry, The Autobiography
When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.
—Pauline Kael
I published it in my W.P.B.
—Rudyard Kipling, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 1920–1930
If I can’t walk, I can’t write.
—Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.
—William Faulkner, Light in August
This walking business is overrated. I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
—Christopher Hitchens, And Yet
Bruce Chatwin liked to hike naked with flowers tied around his penis.
—A fact reported in Bruce Chatwin, Under the Sun
—Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
Thunder is my favorite color.
—Frederick Seidel, “Envoi”
The 4 a.m. Show.
—Les Murray, on his demons, Killing the Black Dog
It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.
—Thelonious Monk
The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.
—Robert Lowell
If you don’t know the exact moment the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.
—Clive James, Latest Readings
Optimism? What is that?
—Voltaire, Candide
I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you.
—Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone interview
He’s just another man who wants to teach me something.
—Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.
—Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.
—Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.
—Gertrude Stein, on Ezra Pound
I took a little celebrational nap.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat
Don’t forget daily and fully undressed naps.
—Jim Harrison, The Raw and the Cooked
I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.
—Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long”
A nap ending precisely at sunset, with its undead overtones, was rarely a good idea.
—Jonathan Lethem, A Gambler’s Anatomy
Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Sleep only means red-cheeks and red-cheeks are not the fit adornments of Caesar.
—Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens
Somatize and the living is easy.
—Ali Smith, Spring
I’d love to fuck your wife.
—Harry Crews, to Tom McGuane
Musical beds is the faculty sport around here.
—Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Oh, the heartbreak of satyriasis.
—Fran Ross, Oreo
There’s no loathing like self-loathing.
—Barbara Hamby, “Hatred”
The only thing lower than me was a dead man.
—Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon
My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.
—Franz Wright
Root tee toot, ahhh root tee toot, oh we’re the members of the Institute.
—John Cheever, when elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters
America takes her writers too seriously.
—Kingsley Amis
Don’t fuck the contributors.
—Harold
Ross
I’ll show you something that isn’t in the Tate.
—Tate Museum Director James Bolivar Manson, leeringly
I don’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can’t come marching through.
—Ella Brennan, of Commander’s Palace
If Emily Dickinson owned a restaurant it would be Chez Panisse.
—Jason Epstein, Eating: A Memoir
The great unrecognized merit of haute cuisine is that it makes you drunk.
—Kenneth Tynan, Right and Left
Like the heavy judgment of God on the sinner, the bill came.
—Robert Hughes, The Spectacle of Skill
The Laughing Room.
—Damon Runyon, on where he imagined the owners of the ‘21’ Club gathered to set menu prices
That was some weird shit.
—George W. Bush, on Donald Trump’s inauguration speech
How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
[I am] thankful that I am old and have no children to leave in a world at the mercy of this lying and bellicose vulgarian.
—Alan Bennett, on Donald Trump, in London Review of Books
He’s the weasel in the tube jammed up our asses.
—Nell Zink, Doxology
The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.
—Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Help us to make America great again.
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore.
—John Prine, song title
—What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you?
—Your first line contains a dangler.
—Ian McEwan, Guardian interview
Typos are worse than fascism.
—I. F. Stone
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
—Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters
You put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong.
—Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
—Mark Twain, Notebooks
I am writing the Great American Suicide Note.
—Bob Kaufman, “Bonsai Poems”
Kill me, por favor.
—Ry Cooder, short story title
What can I do for you except give you directions to the Golden Gate Bridge and a few basics on how to jump?
—Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon
Didn’t Robert Lowell say, if people were equipped with switches,
who wouldn’t be tempted, at some point,
to flick themselves off?
—Lucia Perillo, “Daisies vs. Bees”
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Help me. Please, help me. If you really exist, you skinny jew bastard, help me kill myself.
—Hubert Selby, Jr., Waiting Period
Lay my head on the railroad line,
Train come along, pacify my mind.
—Toni Morrison, Beloved
Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
—Anne Sexton
Shrink it and pink it.
—Designers, traditionally, on products for women
You’ve got to make yourself more cupcakeable.
—Helen Gurley Brown
It is sometimes, as a feminist in the world, difficult to stay pleased.
—Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done
Pretty good, for a woman.
—William Faulkner, on Evelyn Scott
Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny & cannot spell.
—Erica Jong, “Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem”
A good part—and definitely the most fun part—of being a feminist is about frightening men.
—Julie Burchill
Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.
—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
My PhD advisor told me to put a ten dollar bill between the pages of my thesis in the university library. So I can check to see if anyone read it? I asked. No, of course no one will read it, he replied, but when you come back into town you’ll always have money for lunch.
—Carl T. Bergstrom, on Twitter
The only purpose of a university education is to teach people to enjoy life more than they would have done otherwise.
—Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh
You can get straight A’s and still flunk life.
—Walker Percy, The Second Coming
I tell you I can’t read a book, but I can read de people.
—Sojourner Truth
When body odour and volubility meet, there is no remedy.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.
—Stanislaw Lem
All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.
—Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
—Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?
—I wouldn’t go as far as that.
—Samuel Beckett
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
—Wilfrid Sheed, The Good Word and Other Words
With this incredible illness everything sucks. The glorious dawn sucks. The Coronation Mass sucks!
—William Styron, on depression, from an unfinished novel
We all had depression, but Bill was the only one who made money out of it.
—Art Buchwald, on William Styron
Tell Bill Styron to deal with this!
—Stanley Elkin, on using a wheelchair because of his multiple sclerosis
The tornadoed Atlantic of my being.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I was Pearl Harbor’d. December Seventh’d by the Lord.
—Stanley Elkin, The Living End
I can’t stand THE DEPRESSED. It’s like a job, it’s the only thing they work hard at.
—Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
A contact low.
—Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
I believe in white supremacy.
—John Wayne, Playboy interview, 1971
If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.
—Miles Davis
Unbelievably, Miles Davis & John Coltrane
Standing within inches of each other didn’t explode.
—Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
The musical embodiment of a lonely-hearts ad with carefully phrased undertones of sex.
—Kenneth Tynan, on Miles Davis, Tynan Right and Left
Play that.
—Miles Davis, to his band, pointing toward a woman who’d stumbled in the street
Thelonious Monk, are you still bopping
someplace down below?
—Stephen Dobyns, “Lullaby”
Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.
—Don DeLillo, Mao II
What’s the novel about if not getting fucked.
—Olivia Laing, Crudo
I was home writing. I stopped going out … I didn’t fuck anyone new.
—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
What will fatten you, skinny little book?
—Karl Shapiro, The Bourgeois Poet
I preferred my prose with extra wontons.
—Robert Christgau, Going into the City
[Cyril] Connolly famously marked his place in a book he had borrowed with a rasher of bacon.
—Mary-Kay Wilmers, Human Relations and Other Difficulties
Write a novel … A short one, they sell much better.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
—Allen Ginsberg, Cosmopolitan Greetings
—You mean, you made it all up, and they taken it and give you real money for it?
—Yes, Ma. Yes, they have.
—Harry Crews and his mother, Myrtice, after he sold his first novel
Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.
—Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn
Then … there is that liquid the English call coffee.
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
—Abraham Lincoln, attributed
Coffee’s for closers only.
—David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer?
—Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises
Whenever he walked into the dining-room, I raised my glass and smashed it on the table, as every gentleman does in the presence of homosexuals.
—Ernest Hemingway
They tell me that Mr. Hemingway usually kicks people like me in the crotch.
—Tennessee Williams
Let’s face it, sweetheart—without Jews, fags, and gypsies, there is no theater.
—Mel Brooks, in To Be or Not to Be
There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists.
—Vladimir Horowitz
I don’t know where you’d find such a magazine.
—Kenneth Koch, attributed, on a stipulation that the staff of The Harvard Advocate contain no Jews, homosexuals, or drunks
If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal.
—Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times
What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.