—Dwight Morrow

There are two kinds of people in one’s life — people whom one keeps waiting — and the people for whom one waits.

—S. N. Behrman

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

—Blaise Pascal

Nabokov said the big difference between people is those who sleep well, and those who don’t. And Nabokov was of course a champion insomniac. He has a lovely line in a late novella which is, ‘Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible.’ Zadie Smith says that people divide into the organized and the disorganized. And she’s disorganized. But my father, Kingsley Amis, said that a huge division is between those who have a good time with the opposite sex, and those who don’t. And you will know in your early fifties how that balance sheet works.

—Martin Amis

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

—Oscar Wilde

Humanity is divided into two main categories: those who, when faced with an insurmountable difficulty, feel an impulse to kill, and those who, on the contrary, feel an impulse to kill themselves.

—Alberto Moravia

Those who put on a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe vs. those who put on a sock and a shoe and a sock and a shoe.

—Archie Bunker in All in the Family

There are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.

—Nicole Krauss

There are two kinds of people: those who can’t perform the act when they’re sad and those who perform it only to escape sadness. I have a theory that the second kind of person lives longer.

—Sarah Manguso

You might think there’s many kinds of people in this world. But there’s only two kinds: the buyers and the ones that get bought.

—Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier in The Fugitive Kind (1960)

There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.

—John Gray

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.

—Robert Benchley #

Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) was born on Christmas Day in Sutton, a middle-class suburb of London. He became aware of his homosexuality at an early age, and in spite of family and social pressure, he obstinately refused to disguise it. At the age of fourteen he was sent to a typically Spartan English boarding school (which he described as a combination monastery and prison) where he first encountered the kind of hostility that would follow him all his life.

He worked as a commercial designer and a teacher of tap dancing, wrote books on a variety of subjects including lettering, window dressing, and the English Ministry of Labor, but eventually settled into a thirty-five-year career as an artist’s model.

His autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, was published in 1968 and was made into a television play starring John Hurt. Its success vaulted him into international celebrity. He subsequently published a dozen more books, including How to Become a Virgin, How to Have a Lifestyle, Doing It With Style (with Donald Carroll), and Manners From Heaven. After becoming a permanent resident alien in the United States in 1981, he listed his occupation on income tax forms as “retired waif.”

I interviewed him for my book, The Portable Curmudgeon, in 1986. We met at his apartment on East 3rd Street in Manhattan, and after our conversation we repaired to the 2nd Ave Deli for a late lunch. When we entered, the hostess took one look at Quentin and shot a worried glance at the manager. “Put them in the Molly Picon Room,” he said. It was in the back, empty, away from the customers in the main room. I was offended by the treatment but Quentin, in his signature bright makeup and pink hair, was used to it. He was also one the wittiest men of his century:

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.

—

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

—

I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

——

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

—

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?

—

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.

—

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

—

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically—for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist—but then what isn’t?

—

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

—

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

—

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us. #

While most everyone agrees that art matters, few agree on what it is, what it’s for, or even who gets to say. It’s been called an obligation, a refuge, a mistake, a means of venting, a liberation, a washing of the soul. Rather than answer the question, the quotations below amplify it, while keeping the mystery alive:

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

—W. Somerset Maugham

Mystery is the basic element of all works of art.

—Luis Buñuel

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.

—Rebecca Solnit

Good taste is the death of art.

—Marcel Duchamp

Art has an obligation to offend.

—Edward Albee

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

—Lester Bangs

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

—Eudora Welty

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

—Claes Oldenburg

It is the function of art to conceal the difficulties of its execution.

—Susan Sontag

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

—James Baldwin

Art is a means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.

—Robert Crumb

Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.

—Anthony Burgess

There’s never a market for true art.

—Nell Zink

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

—Stella Adler

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

—Leonard Bernstein

There’s a shlemiel and a shlemazel. A shlemiel is a guy who always spills hot soup on someone. A shlemazel is the guy he spills it on.

—Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (1968)

Most comic actors are either a shlemiel or a shlemazel, two roles that serve different functions. The shlemiel creates disorder, the shlemazel inherits it. Oliver Hardy is the pompous, scheming shlemiel, oblivious to his role in every disaster; Stan Laurel is the shlemazel who pays the price with a bewildered blink. Bud Abbott is the shlemiel — clever, manipulative, and not a little mean, while Lou Costello is the shlemazel, trusting and hapless. In their classic “Who’s on First” routine, Bud torments Lou, the increasingly exasperated victim of a pun he can’t fathom. Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden blusters and schemes his way through The Honeymooners while Art Carney’s Ed Norton absorbs the damage.

In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is a 21st-century shlemiel fixated on the trivial breaches of etiquette everyone else ignores. His inability to let things slide drives the plot in every episode. He tactlessly corrects strangers, interrogates acquaintances, and alienates friends.

Curb ran for twelve seasons on HBO, ending in 2024. The show’s signature structure is comedically unorthodox. Normally, the shlemiel and the shlemazel are two different people. In Curb, Larry is sequentially both, a one-man comedy team who spills the soup on himself.

In each episode, the transformation begins when Larry witnesses a transgression. Someone cuts in line; a dinner companion says, “LOL” out loud instead of actually laughing; Susie makes a loud smacking sound after every sip of wine; a woman at a frozen yogurt shop abuses her sample privileges.

Larry can’t help flagging the infractions. The person really was cutting the line; the “LOL” and lip-smacking really are annoying; the yogurt-sample abuser really was holding things up. A lesser show would make Larry simply wrong, a buffoon whose standards are absurd. Curb insists on his correctness. His judgment is sound. He identifies real problems.

When Larry violates the very norms he fights to uphold, he loses the moral high ground. His nitpicking becomes a weapon against him. And when the punishment comes, it’s often from an unexpected direction and worse than his behavior deserves.

After he refuses to give candy to trick-or-treaters he judges too old and not in costume, he wakes up to find his trees toilet-papered and “BALD ASSHOLE” spray-painted across his front door. After confronting the “LOL” woman, he is maneuvered into calling Susie on her lip-smacking, which gets his team disqualified from a golf tournament and destroys several friendships.

In one of the show’s more elaborate examples, after being soaked by a passing car driving through a puddle, Larry discovers a parking ticket on his own car and then learns that the doctor who gave him a clean bill of health is an escaped mental patient.

In Curb’s series finale, Larry is put on trial, with witnesses from across the previous twelve seasons testifying to his lifetime of social offenses. His defense that he was usually right is unsuccessful.

In his latest series, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America, Larry’s alter ego goes back through American history to sabotage key moments. The Declaration of Independence promised the pursuit of happiness. Larry, it turns out, has been working against it for centuries. The shlemiel and the shlemazel were both present at the founding. #

It’s Not Easy Being Larry

You can’t do anything in life. The social barriers in life are so intense and horrific that every encounter is just fraught with so many problems and dread. Every social situation is a potential nightmare.

—

I don’t like talking to people I know. Strangers, I have no problem with.

—

I’m trying to elevate small talk to medium talk.

—

I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.

—

A date is an experience you have with another person that makes you appreciate being alone.

—

The customer is usually a moron and an asshole.

—

I’d rather have the thieves than the neighbors. The thieves don’t impose. Thieves just want your things, neighbors want your time. I’d rather give them things than time.

—

You’re nothing without your health. Some people are nothing even with their health.

—

I don’t really get this fascination that people have with the ocean. I stare at it for ten minutes and I go, “Okay, I get it.”

—

Can I tell you something about apricots? One in thirty is a good one. It’s such a low-percentage fruit.

—

Hear the birds? Sometimes I like to pretend I’m deaf and imagine what it’s like not to hear them. It’s not that bad.

—

I defy anyone to produce any evidence that the word “happy” has ever crossed my lips. I am not now, nor have I ever been, “happy.”

—

It’s till death do us part. After that, all bets are off.

You’re not put on this earth to be happy.

—Jimmy Breslin

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

a medley of extemporanea,

And love is a thing that can never go wrong,

and I am Marie of Romania.

—Dorothy Parker

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

The truth does not change based on our ability to stomach it.

—Flannery O’Connor

We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

—Vladimir Nabokov

The model for personal growth is antithetical to the model for professional growth.

—Milton Glaser

You need to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed, the law of supply and demand ensures that the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it.

—Paul Graham

Contrary to what many of you may imagine, a career in letters is not without its drawbacks – chief among them the unpleasant fact that one is frequently called upon to sit down and write.

—Fran Lebowitz

Just because you’re sick of your script doesn’t mean it’s finished.

—William M. Akers

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

—George Orwell

There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There isn’t even a tunnel.

—Charles Bukowski

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.

—Homer Simpson

Most people know chiasmus when they see or hear it, even if they don’t know its name. Pronounced kī-az-mus (and sometimes called inverted parallelism), it reverses the order of words or ideas to produce an eloquent symmetry. For many Americans, the first encounter with chiasmus came on January 20, 1961, when John F. Kennedy closed his inaugural address with a sentence that still echoes: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy’s address was saturated with the device: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”; “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” The speech is a master class in how a simple inversion can make a sentence unforgettable. By reversing words, chiasmus also reverses perspective.

More than two thousand years after Greek rhetoricians gave the figure its name, the best examples are little acts of linguistic judo, leaving the listener with something more surprising, more memorable, and more true than either half would be alone.

Here are some of my favorites:

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

I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.

—Molly Ivins

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.

—Robert Graves

I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem.

—Dorothy Parker

You know how they say “religion is the opiate of the masses”? I took masses of opiates religiously.

—Carrie Fisher

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

—Cormac McCarthy

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

—Ray Bradbury

In France, philosophers are celebrities. In the United States, celebrities are philosophers.

—Peter Carlson

Movie stars change the script to suit themselves while great actors change themselves to suit the script.

—Michael Caine

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.

—Richard Feynman

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

—Charles Bukowski

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

—James Baldwin

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

Whenever I’m gathered with a group of people over 40 now, we just kind of sit and stare into space and say things like, “What is this life?” And I think that probably comes to everyone…. I have no idea what’s going on most of the time. I can’t handle life at all. But when I’m writing, it’s a controlled area, and I can think things through a bit more calmly, think through ideas, feelings, sort them. But in the life, no. I’m like a merchant of chaos. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know which way is up. I’m terrified of the future. I worry about everything. I’m just another citizen caught up in it. So the people you really need to admire, the people who are in the world facing everything we’re facing and yet able to really function, get out there, do grassroots action, act, keep acting, make decisions. I am not that person. I know I’m not. I’m a writer. It’s a very reduced role. And I enjoy it, and I love to do it. But it’s not to be confused with people who are really able to act in the world in a positive way for others.

—Zadie Smith, Fresh Air, September 5, 2023

Zadie Smith was born in London in 1975, published her first novel, White Teeth, at twenty-four while finishing her degree at Cambridge, and has spent the quarter century since writing fiction, essays, and criticism of uncommon scope and intelligence. She’s the kind of writer whose opinions on life, culture, and politics people value, which makes this passage from a 2023 NPR interview all the more arresting.

Here’s one of the most celebrated writers of her generation admitting she has no idea what’s going on, is terrified of the future, and worries about everything. This confession is striking because people tend to idealize her role. Successful novelists are often imagined to possess unusual insight into life. After all, they create worlds, understand people, and produce books that help readers make sense of experience. Smith rejects that mythology. She loves writing but doesn’t romanticize it. She says, in effect, I don’t understand life any better than anyone else, I just occupy a lane in which confusion can temporarily be organized. In an era when public intellectuals are expected to be activists, spokespersons, or moral authorities, it’s almost subversive to declare, “I’m just a writer.”

The key distinction in the passage is between writing and living. Writing is “a very reduced role” and “a controlled area” where she can think things through calmly, sort ideas and feelings, and attempt to impose a semblance of order on chaos. Otherwise, she’s at life’s mercy like everyone else. The people worth admiring, she says, are those who get out in the world, take action, do grassroots work. She knows she is not that person. Her point is not that writing is useless, but that it’s limited. Understanding life and being able to “handle” it are not the same thing, and the people most capable of articulating experience are not always the best equipped to navigate it.

Smith’s remarks evoke something that arrives with age: admiration for people whose gifts are practical rather than interpretive. Youth tends to glorify originality, brilliance, talent. The older you get, the more respect you develop for people who simply keep punching. In addition to the visionary or the genius, you begin to admire the person who shows up, faces ambiguity, and still manages to act decently. #

Oscar Levant was a concert pianist, composer, film actor, radio wit, television personality, hypochondriac, insomniac, and, by his own account, a case study in dysfunction. He was a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, a close friend of George Gershwin’s, and a man who seemed to have organized his entire existence around the production of devastating one-liners at his own expense. Nobody was harder on Levant than Levant:

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

“Under this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.”

“I’m a self-made man. Who else would help?”

“When I was young I looked like Al Capone, but I lacked his compassion.”

He was able to discourse endlessly on the subject of his own greatness, and on one occasion subjected Aaron Copland to a lengthy diatribe. Unable to stand it any longer, Copland got up to leave. “Why, Aaron, you’re becoming an egomaniac,” Levant told him. “You used to be able to listen to me all night.”

“I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.”

“There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”

“I don’t drink; I don’t like it — it makes me feel good.”

When introduced to Greta Garbo, Oscar quipped, “Sorry, I didn’t catch the name.” He later admitted he had been so overcome by her glamour that all he could do was stammer the line that ironically became a prime example of his self-possessed wit.

To an obnoxious acquaintance: “I’m going to memorize your name and throw my head away.”

During a poker game he was told of Judy Garland’s latest suicide attempt. “Let’s see,” he said, dealing a hand, “she’s two up on me in suicide attempts, but I’m three up on her in nervous breakdowns. Or is it the other way around?”

“Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.” #

I have never been a big fan of firework displays. All that brightness falling, the sad, smoke smell, the finale that is never quite as magnificent as it should be. And then there’s the dispiriting, figurative tendency in modern fireworks. To stand in the cold, watching colored sparks momentarily take the ragged shape of a smiley face or a drunken script that spells ‘Happy Holidays’ would seem, by any objective standard, to be a very low form of entertainment indeed. Yet appreciating fireworks is one of those things by which one is judged on one’s childlike delight in life. It is perfectly acceptable to hate the circus. But to admit that one finds fireworks tiresome is to render oneself a pariah. I suspect that only the tiniest fraction of the crowd gathered on the top of Primrose Hill was genuinely invested in the spectacle, but we all stayed there for a full frigid hour, dutifully manufacturing sharp intakes of breath and other symptoms of ingenuous wonderment.

—Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal (2003)

Something in us responds to fireworks. The Chinese, who invented fireworks in the ninth century by packing gunpowder into bamboo stalks, originally used them to scare away evil spirits. Fire, noise, and light deployed against an invisible threat? The formula hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

July 4th fireworks are the most contradictory of traditions. They distress veterans, terrorize family dogs, start wildfires, and send thousands of people, mostly children, to the emergency room every year. Fireworks closely mimic combat sounds. The irony is palpable: We honor military service by recreating the sounds of war. The VA acknowledges fireworks as a significant PTSD trigger. Veterans’ groups have lobbied for “quiet zones” and advance notice of displays.

For dogs, July 4th is a horror movie in which the monster arrives on schedule, every year. An estimated forty to fifty percent of dogs show significant fear responses to fireworks. A dog’s hearing is roughly four times more sensitive than a human’s, which means what we experience as a festive boom registers to them as something closer to a detonation. They have no framework for fireworks, no way to contextualize the noise, no access to the concept of patriotism. They experience it as pure, inexplicable terror. They cower in bathtubs, escape through gates, doors, and windows. Because they’re utterly terrified, they run as fast as they can until they are lost.

Fireworks cause hundreds of wildfires annually. Consumer fireworks are illegal in most of California, where drought conditions can turn a sparkler into a firestorm. Fireworks release heavy metals including barium, strontium, copper, and lead. Studies show particulate levels increasing from 40 to 100 percent on July 4th, and air quality near fireworks displays briefly exceeding levels associated with serious health risk.

Of the twelve thousand ER visits annually from fireworks injuries, most involve children under 15. Hands and eyes are the most common injury sites. Fireworks also damage hearing. The sustained noise of a professional display — 150 decibels at close range — exceeds the threshold for immediate acoustic injury.

Why do we like to watch controlled explosions while sitting on a blanket eating potato salad? Maybe it’s the thrill of danger without (we think) the danger. Or maybe what we celebrate on the Fourth is not simply independence. Repeated surveys show that most Americans cannot accurately say what happened on July 4th, 1776. Maybe what we celebrate is the bang itself: the flash, the boom, the short, collective gasp of a crowd ooh-ing and ah-ing at the spectacle.

If the bang itself is the real attraction, then criticizing it is un-American. Zoë Heller reveals the unwritten rule: You may hate the circus; you may not hate fireworks. To confess boredom or indifference in the presence of an exploding sky is to mark yourself as a person deficient in wonder, in patriotism, in joy itself — a pariah, as she says, standing apart from the communal gasp while everyone else tilts their faces upward and registers the requisite amazement.

But why is the contract so binding? Why fireworks, and not, say, parades, or marching bands, or any of the other things by which child-like delight in life is supposedly measured? Maybe because fireworks are the only one of these rituals built on real, if remote, danger. The thrill is not the spectacle but the faint possibility that something could go wrong. That’s what makes the silence about its costs so hard to break.

The backlash is already underway. More than a dozen states now ban or significantly restrict consumer fireworks, and the list grows each year. Cities that once anchored their Fourth of July identity in professional displays are quietly replacing them with drone shows, synchronized fleets of lighted drones that trace shapes in the sky in silence. While drones don’t provide the same experience, they’re precise where fireworks are chaotic, silent where fireworks are deafening, orderly where fireworks are momentarily spectacular.

It’s time for the rest of the country to catch up. Not because fireworks aren’t beautiful, but because the calculation has changed. We know more than we did about PTSD, about wildfire risk, about particulate matter, about what a dog hears when a shell goes off blocks away. We know that the annual injury toll is predictable, preventable, and concentrated in children. We know that the communal experience that fireworks provide can be approximated, if not replicated, by other means.

The Fourth will survive the transition. The republic has outlasted larger adjustments to its rituals. What we claim to celebrate—liberty, independence, resilience—doesn’t need a detonator. It merely requires that we acknowledge who is not celebrating with us: the veteran in the basement, the dog under the bed, the child in the emergency room, and the family watching their neighborhood burn.

Do it for the dogs. Do it for all of them. #

Before he became America’s patron saint of exasperation, George Carlin (1937-2008) was a clean-cut nightclub comic and frequent television guest who wore suits, did genial observational humor, and seemed headed for mainstream celebrity. Then, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he reinvented himself. He grew his hair, put on jeans and a T-shirt, got arrested in Milwaukee for obscenity, and never looked back.

What followed, over a series of HBO specials that grew progressively darker and more vehement, was a sustained assault on cherished American assumptions. His famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine became the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case on free speech, but profanity wasn’t the point. Carlin’s real subject was hypocrisy—especially the euphemisms, clichés, and shared delusions people use to avoid seeing the world clearly. He could be juvenile, savage, misanthropic, brilliantly precise, and unexpectedly philosophical, sometimes all within the same sentence. He described himself as a “disappointed idealist.” Both the disappointment and the idealism are unmistakable.

This country was founded by slave owners who told us that all men are created equal.

The only difference between lilies and turds is whatever difference humans have agreed upon; and I don’t always agree.

I don’t have any pet peeves. I have major, psychotic fucking hatreds.

A Boston man who last year shot and killed all twelve members of a jury that convicted him of murder goes on trial again today. Courtroom insiders say jury selection is expected to take quite some time.

Marry an orphan: You’ll never have to spend boring holidays with the in-laws (at most an occasional visit to the cemetery).

When I ask how old your toddler is, I don’t need to hear “27 months.” “He’s two” will do just fine. He’s not a cheese. And I didn’t really care in the first place.

I think TV remotes should have a button that allows you to kill the person on the screen.

Here’s all you have to know about men and women: Women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink, I think female alcoholics ought to be told not to fuck.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

The planet is fine. The people are fucked.

In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.

I, George Carlin, being of sound mind, do not wish, upon my demise, to be buried or cremated. I wish to be BLOWN UP.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

—Franz Kafka

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

—Oscar Wilde

Beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with their feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

—Nora Ephron

Never date a woman whose father calls her “Princess.” Chances are she believes it.

—Wes Smith

If you are rude to your ex-husband’s new wife at your daughter’s wedding, you will make her feel smug. Comfortable. If you are charming and polite, you will make her feel uncomfortable. Which do you want to do?

—Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

—George Bernard Shaw

To fall in love with yourself is the first secret of happiness. I did so at the age of four-and-a-half. Then if you’re not a good mixer you can always fall back on your own company.

—Robert Morley

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

—Erma Bombeck

Never have children, only grandchildren.

—Gore Vidal

One should always be wary of someone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

—Quentin Crisp

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

—Phyllis Diller

Why am I so interested in political power? Because in a democracy, political power shapes all our lives. You can see this in simple, small, relatively insignificant things. Robert Moses, the subject of my first biography, The Power Broker, agreed to put the Manhattan terminus of his Triborough Bridge at 125th Street instead of 96th Street, as had been planned, and as was more convenient and logical, because William Randolph Hearst, the influential publisher, owned real estate on 125th Street and he wanted it condemned for the bridge. Every time you drive twenty-nine blocks out of your way to get to the Triborough Bridge your life is being affected – in a small way, of course – by political power as exercised by Robert Moses.

—Robert Caro in Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography by William Zinsser (1986)

While most people think of power in terms of elections and legislation, Caro is interested in what power leaves behind. In his example, the politically appointed urban planner Robert Moses agrees to move the Triborough Bridge from 96th Street to 125th Street as a favor to the press baron Hearst. The result is not a scandal, but simply that generations of motorists are forced to drive twenty-nine blocks more than they otherwise would have.

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, has placed seven thousand satellites in orbit, more than all other operators in history combined, creating a private communications network that blankets the earth. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Starlink became critical to Ukrainian military operations, providing vital battlefield communications. Musk has admitted that he throttles coverage in combat zones and unilaterally decides where the signal goes and where it doesn’t. According to the SpaceX IPO prospectus, one fifth of the company’s revenue comes from government contracts — the same government Musk was simultaneously overseeing through DOGE. He also owns the social media platform X, which gives him direct control over information that reaches hundreds of millions of people. How did he acquire such power?

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court decision that equated corporate spending with free speech, gave billionaires the right to commit legal bribery. Musk spent an estimated $250 million on Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and was rewarded with a quasi-governmental role leading the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — with access to federal systems, federal data, and federal decision-making that no private citizen had ever held. This is not corruption in the traditional sense but the logical endpoint of a law that treats political spending as speech. And the man with the most speech gets the most access. Unprecedented sums of money now flow into elections because Musk and Trump proved that it works.

Gore Vidal once recalled a story told by his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma. When the isolationist Senator William Borah died in 1940, Senator Gore said, several hundred thousand dollars were found in his safe-deposit box. Asked where the money came from, Gore answered, “The Nazis. To keep us out of the war.” Such old-fashioned graft was secret, illegal, and potentially dangerous to the perpetrators. Citizens United made the safe-deposit box unnecessary. You can now purchase a president or a senator openly and legally, on a scale that makes Hearst and Moses seem quaint. A trillion dollars doesn’t just buy influence. It buys a world everyone else has to live in. #

— JOYCE CAROL OATES

My idea of the perfect pastime as a small child was a new Nancy Drew book and a Sugar Daddy. That would still pretty much be my idea of a perfect evening.

— FRAN LEBOWITZ

I have a secret theory that people who are addicted to reading are almost trying to re-create the joy, the comfortable joy of being read to as a child by a parent or a friendly uncle or an older sibling. Being read to as a child is one of the great experiences in life.

— BILLY COLLINS

I sometimes read books on my iPad. It’s great for traveling, but paper versions are easier to mark up, and I like the feeling of accomplishment I get when measuring the number of pages I’ve just finished — “Three-quarters of an inch!” I like listening to books as well, as that way you can iron at the same time. Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

— DAVID SEDARIS

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

— MAYA ANGELOU

Usually I read several books at a time — old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything — and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch — mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called “powerful” novel — full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog — in fact, when I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher — “hoping that I like the book as much as he does” — I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from my bed.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The lovely thing about being a very fast, very careless reader is, you can read long books and then in a few years you can read them again. And if they’re good, they only get better and more amazing every time. It’s not a bad test for the quality of a book, re-readability. (But it’s no guarantee of the quality of the reader!)

— URSULA K. LE GUIN

I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

— PAT CONROY

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates and the symphony resounds. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

— REBECCA SOLNIT

I opened books like jars.

— ANNIE DILLARD

I’m frightened of eggs. Worse than frightened — they revolt me. Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?

—Alfred Hitchcock

My grandmother used to save gum in little rows in the cabinet. I’d be scared to touch it because it was so gross, so I have a thing about gum. One guest in my home sat at the dinner table, took out some gum from her mouth and put it on her plate — after she left, I threw the plate out.

—Oprah Winfrey

I’m super-scared of sea creatures. Even tiny fish. One time I was in the water — and the water in Barbados is so clear you can see your feet — I saw all these tiny fish swimming around my feet, and I had a panic attack. I just froze. This man had to lift me out of the water.

—Rihanna

You think a dolphin is sweet and friendly — to me, they’re not. I feel anxiety and I feel panic whenever I’m confronting or even thinking about or talking about a dolphin. It’s happening right now.

—Tyra Banks

You wouldn’t think this, but I almost never went to the beach as a kid, even though it was only a few miles away. The first time I ever went to the ocean I couldn’t believe it. My dad took us, and I was so scared at the size of the ocean. I tried surfing once and got conked on the head with the board. So Los Angeles and California were more about the *idea* of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.

—Brian Wilson

I was walking down the promenade in Tenby eating a 99 [an ice cream cone], when this huge fucking seagull came down and swiped it off me. I’ve still got a scar from its claw on my shoulder. I thought it was going to take me away with it. I’ve got a phobia of seagulls now.

—Adele

I have an irrational fear of snakes. When my husband and I moved to a part of Los Angeles County with many rattlesnakes, I tried to desensitize myself by driving every day to a place called Hermosa Reptile Import-Export and forcing myself to watch the anacondas. This seemed to work, but a few years later, when we were living in Malibu and I had a Corvette, a king snake (a “good” snake, not poisonous, by no means anaconda-like) dropped from a garage rafter into the car. My daughter, then four, brought it to show me. I am ashamed to say I ran away. I still think about what would have happened had I driven to the market and noticed my passenger, the snake, on the Pacific Coast Highway.

—Joan Didion

I hyperventilate opening a box of chocolates. I’m the most nervous guy in the world, a frightened little man on red alert from when I wake up until I go to sleep. I was born with fear.

—Ozzy Osbourne

Certain antique furniture. Louis XIV. Victorian kind of shit. Old European furniture. Shit you would find in a castle in Scotland.

—Billy Bob Thornton

I have a horror of sunsets. They are so romantic, so operatic.

—Marcel Proust

I have this terrible fear that I’m going to be forced to take a general knowledge test in public.

—Dick Cavett

Bob Veale (1935–2025) was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who threw as hard as anyone in the National League. In 1964, he was one of the most dominant and feared left-handers in baseball. Standing 6-foot-6 and throwing a blistering fastball that was dubbed a “radio ball” because it could be heard but not seen, he was regularly compared to 1960s icons like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson.

Veale’s line about pitching vs. hitting is often misattributed to Casey Stengel—understandably, since it has the flavor of Stengelese, that famous circular wisdom that contradicted itself while somehow making sense. Or some fans might assume that a comment so delightfully illogical could only have come from Yogi Berra. But Veale deserves the credit, and the quote should be taken more seriously because it works like a koan.

A koan is a paradoxical riddle or anecdote used in Zen practice to push the mind past ordinary thinking—“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” being the most familiar. The point is not to find an answer but to short-circuit the analytical mind’s attempts to find one, and in so doing, arrive at something like understanding. The Veale quotation operates similarly. You hear the first half — good pitching will beat good hitting any time — and you nod. Of course. It’s a baseball truism. Sandy Koufax beats anybody. Then comes the vice versa, and your logical mind reaches for solid ground and finds none: Good hitting also beats good pitching? Yes. Also true. Even Bob Gibson gets shelled. The two statements cancel each other out. You keep turning it over, looking for the hidden answer.

We don’t like ambiguity, yet much of life happens in the space between competing truths. That’s why Veale’s words linger in the mind long after more sensible observations have been forgotten. They remind us that reality often defies neat explanation, that sometimes wisdom lies not in choosing between two opposite ideas but in recognizing that both are true.

Neither pitching nor hitting is inevitably superior to the other. On any given day, in any given game, either can prevail, and that is not a flaw in the game but its essential nature. If good pitching always beat good hitting, you wouldn’t need hitters. If good hitting always beat good pitching, you wouldn’t need pitchers. The vice versa makes the game worth watching. #

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.... I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

I prefer dead writers because you don’t run into them at parties.

Favorite animal: steak.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

I believe in talking behind people’s backs. That way, they hear it more than once.

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.

In the Soviet Union, Capitalism triumphed over Communism. In this country, Capitalism triumphed over Democracy.

War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of. It’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us — it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades. We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio — an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. They buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.

—James Garner as Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison in The Americanization of Emily (1964), Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, adapted from the novel by William Bradford Huie

The speech is designed to shock, and it does. Most anti-war arguments indict governments, generals, or the lust for profit. Chayefsky shifts the blame to mourners and well-meaning civilians at home. The key word is “exalting.” To exalt is to praise and dignify, to lift something above the ordinary. When we exalt bravery in combat and elevate the dead to martyrdom, we make war sacred. In her devotion, Mrs. Barham helps create the conditions for the next war. Chayefsky isn’t mocking grief; he’s observing that some grief becomes a religious ritual. The worship of tragedy ensures its return. But Charlie says that if everyone were as selfish and cowardly as he is, there would be no one to fight wars.

A twice-wounded veteran of the Korean War, James Garner always said that The Americanization of Emily was his favorite among his films. He shared the belief that it is virtue, not cruelty, that perpetuates war. Yet, because he also felt that Korean War veterans deserved the same recognition as vets of other wars, Garner helped raise money to build the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington.

The Americanization of Emily was greeted with outrage by audiences largely made up of war veterans and their families. The critics were divided. Bosley Crowther gave it a glowing endorsement in the New York Times, while the Daily News condemned it as “ridiculous and venal” and in “shockingly bad taste.” Before filming began, the Navy vetted the script and demanded revisions. When Chayefsky refused to change a single word, the Navy declined to assist the production and barred the film from its base theaters.

Chayefsky answered the charge that his script was “subversive” and anti-American by claiming that he’d earned the right to criticize the culture of war because he’d bled for it during World War II: In the winter of 1944, as an infantryman on patrol near Aachen, Germany, he was seriously wounded by a land mine and received a Purple Heart.

War movies that live on, like The Longest Day (1962), portray D-Day as an awe-inspiring strategic victory marked by military genius and courage under fire. Though The Americanization of Emily received two Academy Award nominations (for cinematography and art direction), though film historians regard it as a vanguard anti-war film that prefigured M*A*S*H and Catch-22, and though its Rotten Tomatoes rating is 93%, it remains underseen. Paddy Chayefsky might have predicted that, too.

—Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

—Václav Havel, Summer Meditations (1992)

My natural bent certainly does not lead me to suppose that the worst is always inevitable. Yet I am committed to looking reality in the face and speaking about it without pretense…. It is because I reject lies and running away that I am accused of pessimism; but this rejection implies hope — the hope that truth may be of use. And this is a more optimistic attitude than the choice of indifference, ignorance or sham.

—Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done (1972)

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

—Lewis Mumford, Faith for Living (1940)

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

—George Bernard Shaw (attributed)

All pessimists keep two sets of books, and in one of them they believe something great will happen.

—David Brown, New York Times, February 17, 2002

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind (1955)

The regulars included George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. Other habitués included Oscar Levant, the Marx Brothers, Tallulah Bankhead, Herman Mankiewicz, Edna Ferber, and Noël Coward.

And yet Groucho — one of the funniest men alive, name-checked among the regulars — mostly stayed away. Dick Cavett, who knew him well, remembered why:

Groucho pretty much avoided the legendary Algonquin roundtable of witty people. It didn’t appeal to him somehow. I can remember his saying, “They often came with prepared lines,” and, he said, “It was like opening an oyster and finding a cultured pearl.”

American Masters: Groucho & Cavett, PBS (December 2022)

Groucho’s distinction is one any true wit understands. A natural pearl forms without intervention — an irritant enters the oyster and, over time, something beautiful accretes around it. A cultured pearl is real enough, and, to the untrained eye, often indistinguishable from the natural kind. But it begins with a deliberate implant. Someone put it there. Groucho wanted the real thing. He had no patience for quips that arrived at the table already polished, waiting for their moment. His own humor was reactive, improvised, anarchic. It depended on the room, the straight man (or woman), the unexpected turn of a conversation. To him, scripted lines pretending to be ad libs were a form of cheating.

There’s a lesson in this for anyone who trades in words. The most dazzling remark in the world falls flat if the audience suspects it was ready before the occasion arose. Spontaneity rules. (Or the convincing appearance of it.) The Algonquin Round Table gave us some of the sharpest lines of the twentieth century. Groucho gave us lines no one could have prepared.

The smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls.

—George Plimpton, “The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature,” New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1992

Why should ball size correlate with literary excellence? Golf and baseball, the sports with the smallest balls and the richest literatures, are essentially games of individual confrontation. Pitchers and batters face each other alone. Golfers face the course — and, more importantly, themselves — alone. These are the conditions that produce introspection, and introspection is the engine of great literature. Witness: A Good Walk Spoiled, The Boys of Summer, Ball Four, Golf in the Kingdom.

There’s also the matter of pace. Golf and baseball are sports in which nothing happens most of the time, and what does happen is over in an instant. The silences between moments of action — the miles of solitary walking, the half-innings spent watching from the dugout — give players time to think, and players who think give writers something to write. Football and basketball action is more or less constant, so there’s little time to think.

Baseball in particular carries the weight of tradition in a way no other sport does. The game is played in summer, on dirt and grass, at a pace that invites nostalgia and metaphor. It creates lore. Football does none of this. I doubt if anyone has ever written movingly about the two-minute drill.

And then there are beach balls, which require no explication.