Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Children consider disliking their parents natural, but if the dislike is returned, they are outraged.
The New York action painters want their pictures to jump off the walls and chase you down the street.
Masturbation is a democratic pleasure, practiced by rich and poor, young and old, married and single.
Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.
An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.
People who behave at forty as they did at twenty must sometimes wonder why their charm is not working.
After Voltaire: envy is chained to the portico of the temple of glory and can neither enter nor leave.
Perhaps fortunately, no one has ever found out what it would be like to have all his wishes fulfilled.
King Kong, Count Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera are just looking for love, like the rest of us.
There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.
Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves?
I am forbidden sugar, fat, and alcohol. So hooray, I guess, for oatmeal, lemon juice, and chicken soup.
A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.
Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.
Courage, determination, and hard work are all very nice, but not so nice as an oil well in the back yard.
A dense undergrowth of extension cords sustains my upper world of lights, music, and machines of comfort.
The psychiatrist's office: the only place I can be sure my story will be treated as sad, but interesting.
Aphorisms have never seduced anybody, but they have fooled some into considering themselves worldly-wise.
Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.
I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.
At sixty, I know little more about wisdom than I did at thirty, but I know a great deal more about folly.
Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.
When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.
In New York, pretending to be above the struggle means no seat on the bus and a table next to the kitchen.
When science drove the gods out of nature, they took refuge in poetry and the porticos of civic buildings.
A successful restaurant makes everything in it, including the patrons, seem a little better than they are.
The worship of Mammon may be vulgar or immoral, but it persists while other religions falter and disappear.
A beautiful woman peers out her window, as full of envy as the harridan who peers up at her from the street.
When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.
Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.
Ironic and jittery, we are puzzled by the old heroes with their fighting, boasting, and cocksure lovemaking.
Your love for me is founded in a sentiment. My love for you is founded in the body. A precarious interchange.
I'm being treated like a sex object, cried the lady. No matter. I will take care of it, said Time soothingly.
The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.
A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?
Prudence does not make people happy; it merely deprives them of the excitement of being constantly in trouble.
The soul is no longer honored as it once was, but it still keeps appetite from being the measure of all things.
If you have no power, talk about your influence. If you have power, talk about the constraints that hem you in.
Think of the many different relations of form and content. E.g., the many pairs of trousers and what's in them.
Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.
Loving, not the beloved, is the joy of love. The beloved, knowing this, most resolutely declines to be grateful.
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
Placing the extraordinary at the center of the ordinary, as realism does, is a great comfort to us stay-at-homes.
The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.
At the dinner table, if you can't think of anything to say, sit quietly. Don't throw rolls, or chew on your napkin.
Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.
People often are unsure whether or not they are in love, but they generally know whether or not they are having sex.
In adding up her assets, the ambitious lady calculated the worth of her beautiful body as coldly as everything else.
Pessimists fear becoming the dupes of Hope. Optimists enjoy Hope's company, and consider being duped no great matter.
Amazing that the human race has taken enough time out from thinking about food or sex to create the arts and sciences.