—Gore Vidal, Myron
The Old Testament contains twenty-six laughs.
—Paul Johnson, Humorists
I can walk! I can walk!
—Malcolm McDowell, running wildly down a hill at Lourdes
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
—Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on “motherfucker.”
—Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle
That’s my bag. I’m a motherfucker.
—Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
And even after all my logic and my theory
I add a “Motherfucker” so you ignorant niggas hear me.
—Fugees, “Zealots”
Desire don’t discriminate, said Avery. Desire’s gonna swallow every motherfucker out here.
—Bryan Washington, Lot
The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it … I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.
—Tony Kushner, Angels in America
So much depends upon a red pickup truck, filled with crackers.
—Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days
Southern Hospitiboo.
—Chuck Berry’s term for politeness mixed with hostility, The Autobiography
I sing to thee of Shine
the stoker who was hip enough to flee the fucking ship
and let the white folks drown.
—Etheridge Knight, “Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine”
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.
—Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
Old age isn’t a battle: old age is a massacre.
—Philip Roth, Everyman
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
—T. S. Eliot, in Time magazine
I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.
—Carson McCullers
Home is where your ass is.
—William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys
They all said the way to a man’s heart is through his asshole.
—Edmund White, Our Young Man
Whoever said the soul and the body meet in the pineal gland was a fool. It’s the asshole, stupid.
—André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
In the ass is how you create loyalty.
—Philip Roth, The Human Stain
If I fucked you in the ass I would own you, he’d said.
—Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To
Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption?
—A. R. Ammons, Garbage
The hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chesnut.
—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Words don’t have ass cheeks!
—Jonathan Miles, Dear American Airlines
Why do born-again people so often make you wish they’d never been born the first time?
—Katharine Whitehorn
If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he’d be buried in a matchbox.
—Christopher Hitchens, on Hannity & Colmes
I have no enamamies.
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
—Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda
It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes.
—Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
All is infection, mother …
We shall sit quietly in this room,
and I think we’ll be spared.
—Rita Dove, “Fiammetta Breaks Her Face”
An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away.
—P. G. Wodehouse
Most people, inside are filled with unexamined junk.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
It’s tired and stiff and full of crud. It’s a typical American heart.
—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
Some joker has made a plastic heart. Anything is possible.
—Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol
My heart’s some kind of idiotic fishing bobber.
—George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
I’m the shy heart with the side part.
—Amit Majmudar, Dothead
What grape, to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
What god leant down and whispered in what mortal ear to put walnuts inside an eggplant?
—Annia Ciezadlo, Day of Honey
I surveyed this dish of food and surreptitiously undid the top three buttons of my shorts.
—Gerald Durrell, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives
People in California live in a world of rumors, dreams, and superstitions, because newspapers out there don’t print much news.
—Harold Ross, Letters from the Editor
It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
—Truman Capote
For an easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard.
—Norman Mailer, on Los Angeles, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”
Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A.
—Waylon Jennings, album title
Come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences to sing—come to California.
—Denis Johnson, Already Dead
Let me be Los Angeles.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money.
—Start of a letter from John O’Hara to Harold Ross
I used my grant to fix my teeth.
—Ron Silliman, “Albany”
A large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some.
—Dwight Macdonald, on the Ford Foundation
E. E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.
—Clive James, Poetry Notebook
What’s all the shooting for?
You have money and I haven’t.
—Chelsey Minnis, “Love”
If artists could save a man from a lifetime of digging coal by digging it themselves one hour a week, most would refuse. Some would commit suicide. “It’s not the time, it’s the anticipation! It ruins the whole week! I can’t read, much less write!”
—Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
—William Hazlitt
What I feel bad about is that I don’t feel worse.
—Michael Frayn
Onan.
—Name of Dorothy Parker’s canary, because it spilled its seed on the ground
One inalienable right binds all mankind together—the right of self-abuse.
—Kenneth Tynan, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping
Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
The right hand = the hand that is aggressive, the hand that masturbates. Therefore, to prefer the left hand!… To romanticize it, to sentimentalize it!
—Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
I was sneak
ing time with my own body.
—Patricia Smith, “What You Pray Toward”
Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f[ri]gg[in]g his Imagination.
—Lord Byron, on John Keats
No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.
—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
The birds sang tutti, all of them.
—Delmore Schwartz, “A Small Score”
Without birds I’m dead.
—Jim Harrison, Dead Man’s Float
Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.
—P. G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
Goose swoops down and plucks you out.
—Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Walking with the King.
—Oscar Zeta Acosta, on being on LSD
Don’t worry, if we run out of drugs, we can all suck on Hunter.
—David Felton, to Timothy Crouse, in Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers
Unwanted sex on acid is a nightmare.
—Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
Do your friends shun you? Do people cross the street when they see you approaching?
—Flann O’Brien, The Best of Myles
Gentle reader, did you ever feel yourself snubbed?
—Anthony Trollope, The Warden
There is no disappointment so numbing … as someone no better than you achieving more.
—Joseph Heller, Good as Gold
I spend so much time in your shadow I’m starting to get a vitamin deficiency.
—Rachel Cusk, Transit
Dilated to Meet You.
—Loudon Wainwright III, song title
Here’s a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it’s going to pay off later.
—Colson Whitehead, The Noble Hustle
What not to expect when you are expecting.
—Katie Roiphe, The Power Notebooks
Bab’s baby walks at seven months, waywayway!
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Every man who has changed a diaper has felt impelled … to write a book about it.
—Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives
Diaper backwards spells repaid.
—Marshall McLuhan
Having children is nice. What a great victory to be not-nice.
—Sheila Heti, Motherhood
Goat curry and a female librarian—that’s what I’m in the mood for.
—Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
I’ve always fantasized about library congress. Let’s do it in the HQ 70s.
—Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For
The pleasures of open stacks—with their erotically charged corridors.
—Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice
InterLibrary Loan is my sexual preference.
—Wayne Koestenbaum
I was the town librarian, less a woman than a piece of civic furniture.
—Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
—Saul Bellow
She had that gaunt full-hipped Appalachian stance.
—Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.
—Katharine Whitehorn
That dark day when a man decides he must wear his belt under instead of over his cascading paunch.
—Peter De Vries
Fuck love and just get fat.
—Andrew Sean Greer, Less
She’s fat, but she’s hard, like a table!
—James Dickey, about his wife, Maxine
If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
—Origin unknown
To write a short story you have to be able to stay up all night.
—Lorrie Moore, Paris Review interview
Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch.
—Jim Harrison, Paris Review interview
No one asked you to be happy. Get to work!
—Colette
If you want what the syllables want, just do your job.
—Charles Wright, “A Bad Memory Makes You a Metaphysician, a Good One Makes You a Saint”
I’m sure the neighbors think I’m potty but after all—they can hardly haul me off to the bin for scribble scribble scribble.
—Jean Rhys, letter
Woik! Woik! Woik!
—Donald Hall, quoting his grandfather, A Carnival of Losses
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
—Mary Heaton Vorse
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
—Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi”
The work is finished when you fall over.
—David Hockney, in The New York Times
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness—though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
—Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
—Milan Kundera, The Farewell Party
Fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
—Jeanette Winterson, on happiness, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“Happy” was a word for sorority girls and clowns, and those were two distinctly fucked-up groups of people.
—Emma Straub, Modern Lovers
Hell, I’ve been teeing off on clowns my whole life.
—Ralph Ellison, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
I’m Ai’ight. You’re Ai’ight.
—Paul Beatty, The Sellout
I laced the cocktails with Benzedrine, which I find always makes a party go.
—Henry Chapman, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon
I don’t think heterosexual parties are workable.
—Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries 1960–1969
—Kenneth Tynan, “A Memoir of Manhattan”
An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
—Dylan Thomas
A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.
—Gore Vidal
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me.
—Ambrose Bierce
Hubris? him? what did he have to be hubrid about?
—Stanley Elkin, The MacGuffin
If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.
—Robert Hughes, The Spectacle of Skill
We can forgive you for killing our children. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.
—Golda Meir, to Anwar Sadat
Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody.
—Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
I never forgive but I often forget.
—Hugh Trevor-Roper
She smelled like I would imagine a mermaid would smell.
—Gregg Allman, on Cher, My Cross to Bear
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing for me.
—T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Given a fair field in early youth I suspect I might have become a pretty serious homosexual.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper
&n
bsp; In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling.
—William S. Burroughs
Jesus was a single gentleman.
—Larry Kramer, The American People, Volume Two
Gratitude is my chief erotic emotion.
—Edmund White, Inside a Pearl
I’ll be the Lexus lesbian with a flat tire, and you be the surly biker who stops to help.
—Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For
He was the kind of guy I’d rob banks for.
—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
I’m very fond of my food.
—W. H. Auden, Paris Review interview
Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.
—Zadie Smith, Feel Free
There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery.
—Henry James, Selected Letters
T. Eliot is toilet spelled backwards.
—Samuel Beckett, letter
Tea Ass Eliot.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Little Boy
A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.
—Ernest Hemingway, on T. S. Eliot, letter
My God, ma’am, you’re so pretty I’d walk ten miles barefooted on a freezing morning to stand in your shit.
—Richard Brautigan, The Abortion
Clumps of magic shat out by our errors.
—Lucia Perillo, “Lubricating the Void”
May cowshit stand up and walk.
—Henry Dumas, “Double Nigger”
Doesn’t that liquidate your bowels?
—Ralph Ellison, letter
I could be myself with Miriam, vent my gas, kiss with a bad taste in my mouth, grunt over my bowels on the toilet.
—Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show
I always go for nutters (and they always go for me).
—Angela Carter, letter to Anthony Burgess
You know your trouble, Raven, you don’t hold your fork quite right.
—A headmaster to Simon Raven
Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.
—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.
—Robert Stone, Children of Light
The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in bad taste invariably have very bad taste.
—Joe Orton, in the Transatlantic Review
Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.
—Dave Hickey, Air Guitar
You’re sitting on me style, maybe.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
I feel pretty right wing about education.
—Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper