Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.
If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.
Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.
Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.
The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.
The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.
Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Kings and queens might do wicked things, but they don't nag. One thing I like about Bloody Mary: she never said a word about lung cancer.
Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.
Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one's oppressor.
For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.
I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.
We are incapable of leaving anything to the imagination and loath to leave anything out. Maniacal thoroughness has become our national verbal ideal.
American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.
I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.
If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.
I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.
Animal rights activists gives disillusioned feminists an excuse to go back to being women protecting wee creatures without compromising their radical credentials
Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don't cross.
Of all the old maid's blessing, the greatest is carte blanche. Spinsterhood is powerful; once a woman is called "that crazy old maid" she can get away with anything.
There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin
The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
because the theater lost a Barrymore every time a Southerner decided not to go on the stage, just about anything that comes out of a Southern mouth is bound to be a ringing line.
Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
Let's face it: 'Threatening' people are the only interesting people around. The unthreatening are, by and large, competent mediocrities who take lemming-like aim at careers in television.
Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.
Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.
Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.
There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.
They don't call him 'No Drama Obama' for nothing. He's even worse than we thought because he has committed the ultimate American crime, worse than anything he has been accused of so far: He has no sense of humor.
If last words are to be audible and coherent, they need to be delivered before you have any tubes up your nose or down your throat. Otherwise, the nurse gets the last word when she says, 'Don't try to talk, honey.'
Christopher Hitchens and I were not friends or even acquaintances. We never met or spoke on the phone, just exchanged occasional brief letters - notes, really - hand-written and snail-mailed at first, e-mailed later.
My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.
I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.
Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him.
There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.
Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.
I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.