—Clive James
If you don’t like my story get out of the punt.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
We are a paper frigate sailing on a burning lake.
—Frederick Seidel, “France Now”
Now it’s my turn for the boat with the hole in it.
—Ali Smith, Spring
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Crabbed Age and Youth”
One is very vulnerable in a deck chair.
—Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Today’s smugglers are just your deck-chair dozers.
—Joseph McElroy, A Smuggler’s Bible
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Recuerdo”
Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.
—George Eliot
If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you never need dine or sleep alone.
—Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
[He] should not be delivering a State of the Union address. He should be delivering pizza.
—Clive James, on George W. Bush
Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain.
—Gary Snyder
I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds around my neck.
—Emma Goldman, attributed
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by payment plans.
—Kate Tempest, “Sigh”
Buttered toast with cunty fingers.
—The best breakfast, according to Henry Green, Paris Review interview
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!
—A. A. Milne, “The King’s Breakfast”
Du beurre! Donnez-moi du beurre! Toujours du beurre!
—Fernand Point
By what inevitable degrees does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate?
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
Fate was working its ass off when it got us all together.
—Elmore Leonard, attributed
You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.
—Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
It is good for a man to eat thistles, and to remember that he is an ass.
—E. S. Dallas, on artichokes, Kettner’s Book of the Table
All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.
—Samuel Beckett
People don’t look up to you as a hero when you tell them you were shot in the ass.
—Richard Brautigan, Dreaming of Babylon
Read at whim! Read at whim!
—Randall Jarrell
Death to all modifiers.
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22
When we ask for advice, we are usually asking for an accomplice.
—Saul Bellow, attributed
Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.
—John Updike, Rabbit, Run
High-Tech Redneck.
—George Jones, song title
Dickheads from Dixie.
—What Cy Twombly said a group memoir of himself, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns would be called
I twang it out and leave it there.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
They twanged each other’s underpants.
—Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier
She gets the gravity of the floppy dick just right.
—David Salle, on a painting by Dana Schutz, in Artforum
You have to talk to these art world assholes like you give even less of a fuck than they do.
—Greg Jackson, Prodigals
Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.
—William S. Burroughs
One minute in a skull and the next in a belly.
—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
No matter what you do, someone always gets boiled.
—Margaret Atwood, on fairy tales, The Robber Bride
We boil at different degrees.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence”
You saw my book? What was it doing?
—Dan Jenkins, His Ownself
Where’s jazz going? I don’t know where it’s going. Maybe it’s going to hell.
—Thelonious Monk
—Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth.
—Edna O’Brien, Paris Review interview
It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
—Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
Shut up, he explained.
—Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrunts
Merry Christmas! the man threatened.
—William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Alacrity she served.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Imagine having a very small dick—how vast and unknowable the universe must be to the small-dicked man!
—Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Bob [Geldof] had a cock so big he needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around in … Everything about him announced the fact: the incredibly thin body, the large pushy nose, the jungle smell of the man.
—Rupert Everett, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
He didn’t need pants, he needed Parking Privileges.
—Allan Gurganus, in Interview magazine
He got that Jesus with a hard dick complex.
—Tish Benson, “Fifth-Ward E-mail”
A feller can get along with false teeth and a glass eye and hearing aids and even a hook or a wooden leg if he has to, but there ain’t no known substitute for a big dick.
—Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show
Yo daddy walk like a broke dick dog.
—Hattie Gossett, “yo daddy: an 80s version of the dozens”
Gary’s Got a Boner.
—The Replacements, song title
If a sentence is wordy, then it’s never witty.
—Clive James, Latest Readings
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
—Tom Stoppard, attributed
Vive la bagatelle!
—Jonathan Swift
It was so droll it was practically retarded.
—Joy Williams, “The Girls”
Take eloquence and wring its neck.
—Paul Verlaine
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
—A. J. Liebling
I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.
—Charles Portis, True Grit
People will say anything to appear interesting.
—Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War
You’re a disgrace to your clip-on tie.
—David Mitchell, Slade House
I’d rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.
—Elizabeth Hardwick, Paris Review interview
There are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.
—Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
—William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
As a husband you are … PUNK!!
—Dolly Grey to Zane Grey
[I’ve had] more meaningful relationships with people I’ve sat next to on aeroplanes.
—Angela Carter, on her first husband
If you can hoe corn for fifty cents an hour, day after day, you can learn how to write a novel.
—Jim Harrison, Paris Review interview
You don’t have to be an intellectual to write, you just have to wonder about things and want to know.
—Barry Hannah, Paris Review interview
I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.
—Hubert Selby, Jr.
I figured writing would be like learning how to build houses or lay brick … If I wrote long enough and hard enough, I’d eventually learn how.
—Larry Brown, On Fire
Thackeray had to pay to publish Vanity Fair. Sterne had to pay to publish Tristram Shandy. Defoe had to pay to publish Moll Flanders.
—David Markson, Reader’s Block
The writer of novels has found the oil and anointed himself.
—Saul Bellow, “Distractions of a Fiction Writer”
A writer who doesn’t keep up with what’s out there ain’t gonna be out there.
—Toni Cade Bambara
Organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials.
—Robert Penn Warren, on the sexiness of summer dancing, All the King’s Men
I could not reveal my findings over the public-address system at the dance.
—Terry Southern, “Twirling at Ole Miss”
Swing! your partner, promenade (and when you can get laid get laid).
—A. R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Sissy Spacek with a wicked case of intestinal flu.
—Spalding Grey, on a mental image to delay orgasm, The Journals of Spalding Grey
Winston Churchill.
—The name the young John Lennon would call out while others were saying names like “Brigitte Bardot,” to ruin lights-out masturbation sessions
Oh! Nnnnnnnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn!
—Nicholson Baker, Vox
My father lost me to the Beast at cards.
—First sentence of Angela Carter’s “The Tiger’s Bride”
Someone cut the cards wrong at the beginning, and it’s been like that all along.
—Ian Fleming, letter
Here was the crux of my dilemma: I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die.
—Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father, and a few others.
—Nicholson Baker, A Box of Matches
I didn’t want to see anything worse than me befall her.
—Larry Brown, Big Bad Love
Obsessions are the only things that matter.
—Patricia Highsmith, diary
I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.
—Laura Dern, to Kyle MacLachlan, in Blue Velvet
I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857
Perversion is better than no version at all.
—A. R. Ammons, “The Prescriptive Stalls As”
Even ordinary objects, such as table-tennis paddles, can be adapted as “good pervertables.”
—Camille Paglia, on S&M, “Scholars in Bondage”
A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.
—Shelby Foote
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
—David Mamet
You see, books had been happening to me.
—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
Three call slips at a time.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Leave this bar. Walk west on Forty-second till you come to Fifth. You’ll see two great stone lions. Walk up the steps between those two lions, get yourself a library card and don’t be an idiot.
—Frank McCourt, Tis
I see you have written a book about yourself and called it The World Crisis.
—Arthur Balfour, to Winston Churchill
When you’re buying books, you’re optimistically thinking you’re buying the time to read them.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
I’m not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.
—Sojourner Truth
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.
—Herman Melville
There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain.
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
If you want to commune with the dead, of course what you have to do is drive across the night to Missouri.
—Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Others
Girls in Rolls-Royces, their faces lit by the dash.
—James Salter, Light Years
It’s imperative to have a place to base for face to face.
—Chuck Berry, on cars, The Autobiography
When it gets dark I tow your heart away.
—The Beatles, “Lovely Rita”
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.
—Marguerite Duras, Practicalities
My mother beat me in 4/4 time.
—Sharon Olds, “Silver Spoon Ode”
He had a mother who was less a mother than a gypsy curse.
—Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses
Mother, I want the birthday supper of my childhood,
dripping with sauce.
—Rita Dove, “Lullaby”
Your mother asks
To be your friend again, but the request just hangs in the sidebar.
—Hannah Sullivan, “You, Very Young in New York”
Nobody loves me but my mother—
And she could be jivin’, too.
—B.B. King, “Nobody Loves Me but My Mother”
That’s my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much.
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Aye Oedipus, yir a complex fucker right enough.
—Irvine Welsh, The Acid House
I look eight years older than everybody.
—Stanley Elkin, in The New York Times
I look dead
for my age.
—Kevin Young, “The Escape”
Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
—Bernard Baruch
It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back … Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.
—Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking
We feed others so they won’t eat us.
—Jason Epstein, quoting a chef, Eating: A Memoir
While I’m slicing salami I think how much blood there is in a person’s body. If you put too much stuff in things, they break.
—Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
There’s so much goop inside of us, man, he said, and it all wants to get out.
—Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
Same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
—Henry James, on Thomas Carlyle
I lit my fire, I greased my skillet, and I cooked.
—Charlie Parker
Go, and speed.
—Chaos, to Satan, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
I gave him a generous tip for driving so dangerously.
—Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
I’ll tip you just twice as much if you drive me just half as fast.
—William Shawn, to a cabdriver
A quiet smoke in
a taxi is my idea of bliss.
—James Schuyler, “A Few Days”
Is it possible that he is the late Adolf Hitler, kept alive by Count Dracula?
—John Up
dike, on a cabdriver, Bech: A Book
She decided he was a vampire, which added a dreamlike, sinister undertone to his chattiness.
—Kate Christensen, on a cabdriver, The Last Cruise
I watched her leave for the airport, and said to myself that nothing resembled an ambulance more than a taxicab.
—Philippe Lançon, Disturbance
In my experience the spider is the smallest creature whose gaze can be felt.
—Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.
—Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Will you walk into my wavetrap? said the spiter to the shy.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The crow mocks the ant’s short life from afar.
—Adam Clay, “Understories”
The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind.
—Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
The easiest way for your child to learn about money is for you not to have any.
—Katharine Whitehorn
Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.
—John Waters
Money won’t change you, but time will take you on.
—James Brown, “Money Won’t Change You”
Elvis kicked “How Much is that Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s Fuck.”
—Lester Bangs, in The Village Voice
If Elvis Presley is
King
Who is James Brown?
God?
—Amiri Baraka, “In the Funk World”
Elvis may have been the king of rock ’n’ roll, but I am the queen.
—Little Richard
Few people know what fish think about injustice.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Catwings
Fish cannot carry guns.
—Philip K. Dick, Valis
Do fish ever get seasick?
—James Joyce, Ulysses
In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.
—Herman Melville
Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
—Edna Ferber
Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling.
—André Gide, Journals: 1928–1939
They came ashore with erections.
—John Berryman, “The Armada Song”
The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
—Esther Greenwood, on seeing her first penis, in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
Thundertube … Seedstick … Malcolm Gladwell.
—New names for the penis, in Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes
He thrust his enormous Rehnquist deep within her Whizzer White.