Where does the art end and the entertainment begin? What makes Shakespeare art and the latest horrible network sit-com entertainment (to use the term loosely)? It is partly the quality of endurance. Like elder statesmen, art achieves a certain aura merely therough survival. Apparently the logic goes that if someone or other hasn't burned or buried it after a few hundred years, it can't be too bad.
True art also tends to be abstruse. This characteristic is particularly noticeable in Russian literature, foreign films, and ballet. Nobody in their right mind enjoys these things until they have been taught to appreciate them. You can always tell the people who have been taught to appreciate foreign films. They're the ones who sound like they walked out of a Woody Allen movie. In fact, one suspects that nobody really enjoys these sorts of things, but when you pass a certain point in your education, you come to believe that you will be considered an illiterate cretin by your peers if you don't at least pretend to enjoy the latest Mongolian cinematic masterpiece.
Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for
the copies I give away.
Clarence Darrow
He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on
conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly
That's not writing -- that's typing.
Truman Capote on the writing of Jack Kerouac
Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely
have commentators.
Albert Camus
A bestseller is a book which somehow sold well simply because it
was selling well.
Daniel Boorstin
Quill: An instrument of torture yielded by a goose and commonly
weilded by as ass.
Ambrose Bierce
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H.L. Mencken
Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the
Holy Roman Empire in 800.
Robert Benchley
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for
writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too
famous.
Robert Benchley
Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found
this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed's Chronicles, changing it just
enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn't count
on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover
things like this to become associate professors.
Richard Armour
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very
good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Robert Graves
Since the advent of the Dictaphone there is no longer any
guarantee that a published author will be literate. Mr. [Tom]
Hayden brings the sign of the times a few steps further: he
proves that a visionary need not be coherent.
Garvin Arbuckle
Posterity -- what you write for after being turned down by
publishers.
George Ade
In such novels as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald depicts the spirit of the hour which is usually about
4 a.m. His suave young men, always commuting between Princeton
and The Plaza in Stutz Bearcats never sat still for long. It was
too uncomfortable, with a large flask in the hip pocket.
Richard Armour
I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still
romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an
upper-class prerogative.
Alfred Kazin
Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to
the one on the rung above him.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All work and no plagiarism makes a dull speech.
Jacob M. Braude
[Beowolf] is considered an epic because of its long speeches,
its digressions, its repetition, and its being required.
Richard Armour
(Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are
loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.
Richard Armour
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the
mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
Nicholas de Chamfort
The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that
anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the
public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.
Edmund Wilson
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.
Peter Devries
He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks
with equal fluency the American and English languages.
Max Eastman
It takes the publishing industry so long to produce books it's
no wonder so many are posthumous.
Teressa Skelton
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him
crow.
George Eliot
Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down
frequently to rest.
Max Eastman
Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.
Clifton Fadiman
To read some magazines makes you wonder what the editor has
rejected.
Farmer's Almanac
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
William Faulkner
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F.Scott Fitzgerald
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation,
the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever
afterwards.
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher to author: Your novel is excellent, but right now I'm
looking for trash.
John Frost
I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer
who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being
translated into another language.
Robert Frost
Any fool can criticize, and many of them do.
Archbishop C. Garbett
I never read a book before reviewing it. It prejudices me so.
Sydney Smith
Asking a working writer what he thinks of critics is like asking
a lamp-post what it thinks about dogs.
Christopher Hampton
To escape criticism -- do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard
He wasn't exactly hostile to facts, but he was apathetic to
them.
Wolcott Gibbs on Alexander Woollcott
Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms, like a
chaste whore.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were
to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said
for the idea.
Lance Morrow
People are discontent; men are troubled; and the literature is
excellent.
Andre Maurois
Adolf Hitler was a great man. His name alone can still heighten
awareness and incite the torpid glance. (Note, for instance, how
you reacted after reading my first sentence.)
D. Keith Mano
Some people think that physics was invented by Sir Francis
Bacon, who was hit by an apple when he was sitting under a tree
one day writing Shakespeare.
Eric Larrabe
A good many writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped,
self- addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come
back in. This is too much a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do
not fit our present needs." But there are times when I want to
reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note."
Richard Conniff
He has delusions of adequacy.
Walter Kerr
While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his
very worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his
best.
Samuel Johnson
Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which
you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is
good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
He was dull in a new way, and that made many people call him
great.
Samuel Johnson
You have two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.
Samuel Johnson, to James Boswell
During five literary generations every enlightened person had
despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those
enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense
still there.
George Orwell
I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
Dorothy Parker
Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.
Alexander Woollcott
If there's any literary ability in a feller, getting fired out
of a good government job will bring it out.
Kin Hubbard
The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's
philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"
Sidney Hook
Anyone who paints skies green and pastures blue should be
sterilized.
Adolf Hitler
Some of the new books are so down to earth they ought to be
ploughed under.
Anne Herbert
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be
published.
Russell Lynes
H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers
who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of
American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was
also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
Ben Hecht
Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise
passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original
author?
Philip J. Hamerton
Anybody who can write home for money can write for magazines.
Wilson Mizner
Whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" undoubtedly is
somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be aphrodisiac.
John M. Woolsey,
U.S. District Court judge
There's nothing wrong with Oscar Levant -- nothing a miracle
won't cure.
Alexander Woollcott
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are
well written or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old
age.
Oscar Wilde
The difference between journalism and literature is that
journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.
Oscar Wilde
M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he
can at least be dull.
Oscar Wilde
Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like paying
someone to take a bath for you.
Mae West
He was an author whose works were so well known as to be almost
confidential.
Stanley Walker
To me, Poe's prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austen's. No,
there is a difference. I could read his prose on a salary, but
not Jane's.
Mark Twain
A classic is something everybody wants to have read and nobody
wants to read.
Mark Twain
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it,
inspiring the cabbages.
Mark Twain
Immature artists immitate. Mature artists steal.
Lionel Trilling
Satire is the sort of mirror in which beholders generally
discover everybody's face but their own.
Jonathon Swift
James Joyce -- an essentially private man who wished his total
indifference to public opinion to be universally recognized.
Tom Stoppard
In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every
other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will
give your style.
Sydney Smith
I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but
forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live
as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
Dorothy Parker,
reviewing the Autobiography of Margot Asquith
This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled
with great force.
Dorothy Parker
It was written without fear and without research.
Dorothy Parker, reviewing a book on science
He has a mind so set that not a fact can violate it.
National Review,
on Norman Mailer
Saul Bellow writes that true power is the ability to inflict
boredom. I don't know about you, but it scares the hell out of me
to think that Andy Rooney is the most powerful being on this or
any other planet.
National Lampoon
He writes his plays for the ages - the ages between five and
ten.
George Nathan
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls
and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the
utterly bewildered.
Al Capp,on abstract art
One reassuring thing about modern art is that things
can't possibly be as bad as they're painted.
Visitor to Bitish Museum of Modern Art
Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity.
It's just that the rest are so bad.
Salvador Dali
There's nothing wrong with a surrealist painting that
a good paint remover can't remedy.
Anon
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid
remarks as a painting in a museum.
Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.
John Murray Gibbon
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom
even ordinarily respectable.
H.L. Mencken
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only
thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had
reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters
greater than himself.
Oscar Wilde
I like Wagner's music better than anybody's; it's so loud, one
can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one
says.
Oscar Wilde
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can't
stand Picasso, those who can't stand Raphael, and those who've
never heard of either of them.
John White
Highbrow: A fellow who can listen to the "William Tell Overture"
without thinking of "The Lone Ranger."
Jack Perlis
The harpsicord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a
corrugated tin roof.
Sir Thomas Beecham
Even Bach comes down to the basic suck, blow, suck, suck, blow.
Larry Adler, harmonica player
Bethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of
nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer.
John Ruskin
The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap
between Dorothy and Chopin.
George Ade
Composers shouldn't think too much -- it interferes with their
plagiarism.
The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
Classical music is the kind that we keep hopin' will turn into a
tune.
When I die I intend to take my music with me. I don't know
what's out there, but I want to make sure it's in my key.
George, if you had to do it all over, would you fall in love
with yourself again?
Robert Creely's poems have two main characteristics. 1) They are
short; 2) they are not short enough.
Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.
A mighty good sausage-stuffer was spoiled when that man became a
poet. He would look well standing under a descending pile driver.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St.
Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring
we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty
habits.
Who is this [Alexander] Pope that I hear so much about? I cannot
discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in
prose?
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike
it, the other is to read Pope.
If its length be not considered a merit, it hath no other.
A good musical comedy consists largely of disorderly conduct
occassionally interrupted by talk.
To me, opera is getting stabbed and instead of bleeding you
sing.
In opera, anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.
Sleep in an excellent way of listening to an opera.
If you asked central casting in Hollywood for somebody to play
the role of President, they'd send you John Connally.
I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.
Elizabeth Taylor looks like two small boys fighting underneath a
mink blanket.
Applause: the echo of a platitude.
It was one of those plays in which all of the actors
unfortunately enunciated very clearly.
The best audience is one that is intelligent, well-educated, and
a little drunk.
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I
had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only
sooner.
It's so clean here [in California]...That's because they don't
throw out their garbage. They make it into TV shows instead.
Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become
well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will
associate with a producer.
A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.
If we have his [Roger Moore's] looks at 53, we'll be lucky. If
we have his luck with women, we'll be dead.
It was a dream world, a kind of Alice in Wonderland, with its
kings and queens, princes and princesses, and our millions of
loyal subjects. But it wasn't real, and it couldn't last.
If I had as many love affairs as you fellows have given me
credit for, I would now be speaking to you from inside a jar at
the Harvard Medical School.
I wish to be cremated when I die and my ashes to be thrown in
[Hollywood producer] Harry Cohn's face.
In Hollywood, a starlet is a name for any woman under thirty who
is not actively employed in a brothel.
Therre was popcorn in paradise.
Writers are idiots with Underwoods.
The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries. Why should I let
two thousand years of publicity go to waste?
Keep it out of focus. I want to win the foreign-picture award.
The only reason to make a million dollars in this business is to
tell some fat producer to go to hell.
I found out that acting was hell. You spend all your time
trying to do what they put people is asylums for.
A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he's not alone
in the way he feels about himself.
The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed
her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
Most of the time he [Marlon Brando] sounds like he has a mouth
full of toilet paper.
Bogey's a helluva nice guy until 11:30 p.m. After that he
thinks he's Bogart.
I believe that God felt sorry for actors, so he created
Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool.
Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when
they can stay at home and watch bad television for nothing?
[Cole Porter] sang like a hinge.
Farrah [Fawcett] is uniquely suited to play a woman of limited
intelligence, but the subtle sexual tension intended for her role
in completely lost on her. She fits in perfectly with the general
texture of this abysmal film and radiates all the intense
sensuality of an inflatable sex doll.
BOOM! -- Tennessee William's play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop
Here Anymore destroyed as only Liz-'n'-Dick can do it.
No, Groucho is not my real name. I'm breaking it in for a
friend.
I'm not a human being. I'm despicable and disgusting - but
that's where the money is.
Danny Osmund has all the style and flare of a glass of milk.
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at playing abstract confusion in
the same way that a midget is good at being short.
I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would
immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre
admission and the babysitter were worth it.
Some people claim I say all actors are cattle. What I say is
that all actors should be treated like cattle.
Yentl wasn't conventionally bad. It's a big, wooden, inert ark
of a movie waiting, high and dry, for someone to provide a flood
that it might float away.
Debbie Reynolds is as wistful as an iron foundry.
With Tallulah [Bankhead], a leading man has an exhausting time
offstage.
I don't have ulcers; I give them.
The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What
audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.
Mr. Cooper said to me that he had an idea for a film in mind.
The only thing he'd tell me was that I was going to have the
tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally, I thought
of Clark Gable.
They shoot too many pictures and not enough actors.
You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their
eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.
A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city,
but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo
sober.
In Hollywood, success is relative. Th closer the relative, the
greater the success.
The most expensive fix in the world is celluloid, not heroin,
and I need a fix every few years.
John Denver is Johnny Mathis disquised as a hillbilly. He has
never written a decent song, his voice is an Irish tenor only a
whit less offensive than Dennis Day's, and, as far as I can tell,
his only function is to provide adolescent girls with records to
cry over in the privacy of their bedrooms.
I keep saying I wish I had as much in bed as I get in the
newspapers. I'd be real busy.
Some say, what is the Salvation of the Movies? I say, run 'em
backwards. It can't hurt 'em and it's worth a trial.
I get tired of singing to the guys I beat up in motion pictures.
I know my hair is out of the '60's, my clothes are '50's and the
shoes I wear are from the '40's. But I like looking like I came
out of a fairy tale.
The only 'ism' Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
She [Katharine Hepburn] ran the whole gamut of emotions from A
to B.
Good heavens, television is something you appear on; you don't
watch.
Cheryl Ladd Special -- One-hour long, one thought show of
jigglevision.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on
the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I wish you would come up with a different device than running a
man down with a car, as we have done this now in three different
shows. I like the idea of sadism, but I hope that we can come up
with a different approach to it.
Cute teenagers exist only on television, I suspect.
Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know
how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.
Just as you get ready to throw a punch [at Phil Donahue], he
steps back and pre-emptively jabs himself in the face.
Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from
coughing.
I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse
circumstances - the curtain was up.
Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.
You can't shoot the actors, they're not animals!
Oh, no? Have you ever eaten with one?
Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down
unless you're a king.
The stage can be defined as a place where Shakespeare murdered
Hamlet and a great many Hamlets murdered Shakespeare.
The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in
front of it.
[Reviewing a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin] The dogs were
poorly supported by the cast.
Eons ago I staggered out of the stage show [of Annie] to get a
stiff drink -- and maybe burn down an orphanage -- I felt as if a
large scruffy dog had been licking my face for a couple of hours.
There is no racial or religious prejudice among people in the
theater. The only prejudice is against bad actors, especially
successful ones.
Mrs. Patrick Cambell is an aged British battleship sinking
rapidly and firing every available gun on her rescuers.
Shoot her.
There was laughter in the back of the theater, leading to the
belief that someone was telling jokes back there.
One of my chief regrets during my years in the theatre is that I
couldn't sit in the audience and watch me.
A certain columnist has been banned from all Shubert openings.
Now he can wait three days and go to their closings.
Mark Twain
Howard Dietz
David Gerrold
Kin Hubbard
George Burns
Oscar Levant, to George Gershwin
John Simon
Antoine de Rivorol
Eugene Field
Robert Frost
Dorothy Parker, on the poetry of the 1920's
Robert Heinlein
King George II
Oscar Wilde
Edmund Waller,on Milton's Paradise Lost
George Ade
Joey Adams
Voltaire
Ludwig van Beethoven
James Stephens
Phil Crane
Humphrey Bogart, attributed last words
Blackwell
Ambrose Bierce
Robert Benchley
Alben W. Barkley
Tallulah Bankhead
Woody Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Fred Allen
Samuel Goldwyn
Bill Harris
Sylvia Sidney, of her time in Hollywood
Frank Sinatra
Norman Krasna
Ben Hecht
Ben M. Hall,
on the introduction of the "talkies"
Darryl F. Zanuck
Cecil B. DeMille, producer of The Ten Commandments
Billy Wilder
Humphrey Bogart
Jane Fonda
Jack Crason
Bette Davis
Rex Reed
Dave Chasen
Sir Cedric Hardwicke
Samuel Goldwyn
Ethel Merman
Harry and Michael Medved
Harry and Michael Medved, on a Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor performance
Groucho Marx
Steve Martin
Stuart Kline
Clive James
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
New York Times
Oscar Levant
Donald Cook
Harry Cohn, American film producer
Charlie Chaplin,1916
Fay Wray, female lead in King Kong
Walter Winchell
Michael Wilding
Orson Welles
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Arthur Treacher
Stephen Spielberg
Steve Simels
Linda Ronstadt
Will Rogers
Elvis Presley
Dolly Parton
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Noel Coward
Edwin Diamond
Groucho Marx
Quinn Martin, in a memo on the Untouchables
Robert MacKenzie
Orson Welles, on the television miniseries The Winds of War
Washington Journalism Review
Sir Ralph Richardson
Groucho Marx
George Nathan
from The Producers
Josephine Hull
Robert Morse
Alexander Woollcott
Don Herold
Bruce Williamson
Helen Hayes
Alexander Woollcott, in a drama review
George S. Kaufman, when asked by a press agent about "How do I get our leading lady's name in the Times?"
George S. Kaufman, leading off a review of a comedy
John Barrymore
Walter Winchell, on himself