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Varley's quotes du jour 2008-9 |
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12/31/09 Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic. |
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12/30/09 Invictus
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12/29/09 The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. |
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12/28/09 Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs. |
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12/27/09 Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing. |
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12/26/09 He patted the typewriter. "What's that?" "A mechanical writing machine, a marvel of the age. It processes, paginates, and prints, and it's immune to electrical storms, power failures, hackers, and viruses. It will revolutionize the computer age as we know it." |
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12/25/09 Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank thee for the Christmas turkey before us - a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird - a social being capable of actual affection, nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family. |
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12/24/09 The island town of Newport had seen many lives, having been a pirate haven, a fishing port, and a home for whalers and sea traders. Widows’ walks and carved wooden pineapples attested to the maritime tradition. The captains’ wives would stroll the widows’ walks, scanning the horizon for the sight of a sail that might be bearing their husbands home. These stalwarts, once home, and not having been with their mates in maybe two years, would place a pineapple on the front steps when they were ready to leave the bedroom and receive visitors. Eventually, the carved pineapple became a symbol of hospitality. Or fertility. Or sexual satiation. There was actually zoning in parts of old Newport that would demand the houses be painted only in colors available in Colonial times. The BMWs could be any color, though. |
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12/23/09 Another phenomenon that engaged Neal was the propensity of American tourists to wear clothing extolling the virtues of hometowns they had just paid lots of money to escape. It seemed that half the people he observed wore T-shirts with slogans such as NO PLACE BUT ELKHART and I LUV ALBUQUERQUE, or baseball caps proclaiming loyalty to home teams, which under further consideration Neal realized he understood perfectly. After all, he was the one who checked the papers twice a day to get the baseball scores and root in absentia for Steinbrenner’s team to win the Pennant, which even Neal acknowledged was like cheering for the Nazis to overrun Holland. |
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12/22/09 “I’m John Chase and I’m having a scotch. What are you having?” “Scotch is fine, thank you.” “Scotch is fine, and you’re welcome. Soda or water?” “Neither.” “Ice?” “Mr. Campbell in fifth grade science told me ice melts and becomes water.” “Mr. Campbell wasn’t drinking fast enough.” |
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12/21/09 The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil. Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces. |
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12/20/09 If I am right, then [religious fundamentalists] will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If THEY are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites. |
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12/19/09 I was raised to be charming, not sincere. |
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12/18/09 Our [conservatives'] attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. |
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12/17/09 If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. |
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12/16/09 Right here in town, a man and a woman were struggling through the storm to get home and finally they made it into the house and she looked at him and she’d never seen him before in her life. She said, “You’re not Bob.” He said no, he was Larry. She said, “Where’d my husband go?” He said he didn’t know, that he saw her reach out her hand so he took it. She said, “I wonder what happened to Bob.” He said he had no idea. She said, “Well, as long as you’re here, you may as well come in and get warm.” And he did. And they’re still together. Had three children. Bob never came home. That was in 1975. January. Sure tells you something about marriage, doesn’t it. |
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12/15/09 Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine. |
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12/14/09 Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment. |
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12/13/09 They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. |
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12/12/09 The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian. |
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12/11/09
When he plays his
drums, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum |
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12/10/09 Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment. |
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12/9/09 The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. |
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12/8/09 The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it. |
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12/7/09 People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up. |
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12/6/09 “There are four main pleasures of life,” Dad used to say. “Sweet corn, and the love of knowledge, and the love of God, and the one that you boys thought of first.” He winked at us. “The hitch is that nobody can have all four. No, sir. You have to sacrifice one. Most people I know gave up the love of knowledge. I gave up the fourth one. I have no idea where you children came from.” |
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12/5/09 I like young actors because they're so unspoiled, not like some of those actors who are about half an hour into their fifteen minutes of fame by the time they get to me. |
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12/4/09 Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. |
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12/3/09 I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, 'cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had! |
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12/2/09 I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. |
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12/1/09 Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. |
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11/30/09 Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. |
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11/29/09 Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. |
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11/28/09 Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. |
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11/27/09 I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby? |
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11/26/09 I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. |
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11/25/09 In my room as a kid... I'd play a fighter and get knocked to the floor and come back to win. |
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11/24/09 The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. |
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11/23/09 It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up. |
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11/22/09 Basically, Lutherans don’t believe you can get rid of guilt by bursting into tears. We believe that you work off guilt by serving on committees. That’s what leads people to coach youth basketball and be on the church board, you know. A good sense of guilt. Your average peewee-hockey coach is a guy who is paying back for a weekend in a motel with an aerobics instructor named Trish. When people run somebody out of town for messing around, they’re losing the person who could have run Vacation Bible School for the next twenty years and never expect a word of thanks. |
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11/21/09 It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. |
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11/20/09 If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else. |
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11/19/09 There are people who are very resourceful, at being remorseful, and who apparently feel that the best way to make friends is to do something terrible and then make amends. |
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11/18/09 The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution. |
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11/17/09 Those former journalists who later turned to writing fiction subscribed to that tiresome Hemingway dictum of writing about what you know. What bullshit was this? Novels should be about the people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice? |
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11/16/09 In my opinion the only thing that could improve the game of golf is snipers. I feel that this would really speed up the game. Instead of standing out there forever contemplating the three feet of grass between them and the cup, golfers in my version of the game would be sprinting onto the green, taking a running whack at the ball and diving for the sand trap as bullets stitched at their heels. |
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11/15/09 The Dark Lutherans throve in a cold climate, believing that adversity and suffering were given as moral instruction, and so was sickness—the Darks were never much for medicine beyond the use of cold compresses and purgatives. Their religion was part Christianity and part ancient Nordic precept that the gods were waiting to smack you one if you have too good a time. Better to anticipate disaster. If life was not miserable now, it would be eventually, so you might as well get an early start on the weeping and gnashing of teeth. |
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11/14/09 I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. |
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11/13/09 I was thinking about it this morning, how this story [A Christmas Carol] ties into everything we're going through. Every construct we've built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can't protect us against personal greed. |
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11/12/09 To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extol their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us. |
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11/11/09 If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up. |
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11/10/09 Do you know that more people were killed in South Africa in the two years after apartheid than died during it? Same thing with Yugoslavia after the Communists. I mean, Fascism sucks, but it keeps people in line. The moment it's over, all that bad blood people have been holding in? Forget about it. People get whacked for things they forgot they did. |
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11/9/09 I'd never been on a private jet before, so I really had nothing to compare it to. I couldn't even make a leap and compare it to a private yacht or a private island because I'd never been on one of those, either. About the only "private" thing I owned was my car, a rebuilt '63 Porsche. So ... being on a private jet was a lot like being in my car. Except the jet was bigger. And faster. And had a bar. And flew. |
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11/8/09 "See, you Baptists are supposed to – what is it? – Accept Christ as your personal savior, right?" "I guess that's the basic idea."
"See, that's a
mistake, that 'personal' part. What you need is a middleman, a
fixer, a priest. I go to confession every day, Jack, every day. I go
to confession, I rat myself out to the priest, the priest |
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11/7/09 If some company is too big to fail, then it’s too big to exist. Break it up. |
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11/6/09 You heard that saying about not taking the easy way out? Sometimes the easy way is the best way. A lot of smart people have put in a lot of time making things easier. People who tell you not to take the easy way out are the same people who'll then get on a plane to the West Coast instead of taking a covered wagon, which would be a lot harder. |
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11/5/09 Well, the beans are spilled and I think I'm through with baseball. I got $5,000. I could have got just about that much by being on the level if the Sox had won the Series. And now I'm out of baseball — the only profession I know anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us. |
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11/4/09 Without losers, where would the winners be? |
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11/3/09 To get along with me, don't increase my tension. |
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11/2/09 The Bad News Bears revived my own childhood memories of Little League, which I hated; it was a meritocracy in which good players were heroes and I was pointed toward right field with the hope that I would just keep on walking. |
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11/1/09 There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. |
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10/31/09 The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time. |
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10/30/09 After the game, Jackie Robinson came into our clubhouse and shook my hand. He said, “You're a helluva ballplayer and you've got a great future.” I thought that was a classy gesture, one I wasn't then capable of making. I was a bad loser. What meant even more was what Jackie told the press, “Mantle beat us. He was the difference between the two teams. They didn't miss DiMaggio.” I have to admit, I became a Jackie Robinson fan on the spot. And when I think of that World Series, his gesture is what comes to mind. Here was a player who had without doubt suffered more abuse and more taunts and more hatred than any player in the history of the game. And he had made a special effort to compliment and encourage a young white kid from Oklahoma. |
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10/29/09 You have two hemispheres in your brain - a left and a right side. The left side controls the right side of your body and right controls the left half. It's a fact. Therefore, left-handers are the only people in their right minds. |
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10/28/09 The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws. |
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10/27/09 Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. |
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10/26/09 What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series? No cubs. |
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10/25/09 The Good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong right arm, a good body, and a weak mind. |
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10/24/09 During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. |
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10/23/09 There is talk that I am Jewish — just because my father was Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I speak Yiddish, and once studied to be a rabbi and a cantor. Well, that’s how rumors get started. Al Schacht, the first Clown Prince of Baseball |
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10/22/09 Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits. |
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10/21/09 A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big-leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues. |
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10/20/09 Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax. |
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10/19/09 I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice. |
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10/18/09 I believe in the Church of Baseball. I tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance. Ron Shelton, Bull Durham |
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10/17/09 Baseball was like life, a thinking man's game, a matter of the mind. Ryan had a career batting average of .305 in college, which made him a star, and which also meant that he failed seven out of ten trips to the plate. "You have to put the last failure behind you," his coach had told him. "If you don't, it's over." |
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10/16/09 The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second class citizen to a second class immortal. |
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10/15/09 The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them. |
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10/14/09 Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them. |
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1013/09 I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. |
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10/12/09 People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it. |
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10/11/09 “Maybe God is gay and it’s the rest of you people who are messed up and going to hell. You ever think about that? Maybe there’s another Bible out there that tells us to stone you guys and not to lie with women because it’s strange.” |
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10/10/09 I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance. |
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10/9/09 Over a three year period, I gave away half of what I had. To be honest, my hands shook as I signed it away. I knew I was taking myself out of the race to be the richest man in the world. |
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10/8/09 The terrorist is the one with the small bomb. |
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10/7/09 America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. |
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10/6/09 I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money. |
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10/5/09 Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything. |
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10/4/09 “I’ve tried to tell him that even if there is a God, the New Testament is the one to go by, and it’s not tough on us queers. It’s just the old mean version of God that gives us a hard time. Motherfucker in the Old Testament won’t even let us have a pork chop.” “God must have finally got laid between the Old Testament and the New Testament,” I said. “’Cause between those two books, he sure mellowed out.” |
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10/3/09 Some years I'm the coolest thing that ever happened, and then the next year everyone's so over me, and I'm just so past my sell date. |
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10/2/09 While making his music, Elvis had been the essence of cool, but in his movies he was often a self-parody embarrassing to watch. Colonel Parker, his manager, who had picked movie scripts for him, had served Elvis less well than the monk Rasputin had served Czar Nicholas and Alexandra. |
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10/1/09 I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know that I'm not blonde. |
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9/30/09 If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself. |
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9/29/09 You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. |
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9/28/09 That is where the power, opportunity, and choice come from - when you have money. Money equals opportunity. There is no question. |
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9/27/09 “John’s brother hates him because he’s gay. He tells him he doesn’t have to be gay. He’s telling him God doesn’t want him to be gay.” “Even if God made him that way?” I said. “Provided there was a God.” “If there was one, and he made someone gay, wouldn’t God his own goddam self be responsible?” Leonard said. “In my book yes. But in the Christians’ book, that rascal can do no wrong. Someone survives a hurricane, it was God’s mercy. Someone drowns, it was God’s will. I don’t like him. He’s a bully.” |
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9/26/09 I had looked into the abyss so much it was no longer just looking back at me, it had its arms around me and was puckering to kiss. |
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9/25/09 If it cost a dollar to fart I’d have to sweat instead. |
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9/24/09 Whose manuscript should be allowed to appear as a play in the 17th century? In London, you had to have government approval before you could put on a play. Shakespeare had to get that approval from the authorities. So what the computer does is subvert those traditional gate-keeping facilities. You don’t need an editor, you don’t need a publisher. All you need is a Wi-Fi and an Apple laptop and a place to sit at Starbucks and you’re a writer. |
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9/23/09 I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. |
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9/22/09 Though I agreed that guns didn’t kill people, people killed people, guns sure made it a lot easier and far more successful than hunting down victims with a pointed stick. |
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9/21/09 The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so. |
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9/20/09 There is no irony in Pastor Ingqvist whatsoever. Probably that is a good thing if you are a pastor in Lake Wobegon, but wouldn’t you need to go away somewhere for a few days where you could be sarcastic? Maybe there is a motel in South Dakota catering to the ministerial trade, a Holiday Inn with a big atrium that had a pool and potted trees where flabby men in bikinis lie on chaise longues sipping Mai Tais and making withering remarks about their parishioners. |
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9/19/09 For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion. |
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9/18/09 In March 1998, Mike Turner wrote [an article] called “Cosmology Solved? Maybe.” In April he recycled the text with the less reserved title “Cosmology Solved?” And in October 1998 Mike took the next step when he entitled his talk “Cosmology Solved? Quite Possibly.” I’m looking forward to his future work, “Cosmology Solved!” |
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9/17/09 Constipation was epidemic in the nineteenth century, because people were afraid to drink the water. That’s why Thoreau raised beans at Walden; when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he was referring to a specific problem. |
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9/16/09 On her résumé, she listed the Sam Houston Institute of Technology. I like jokes like that from a woman. |
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9/15/09 I had no idea that the hotel on the Upper West Side where Holden Caulfield stayed—where the elevator man offered to get him a prostitute, remember?—was bought by J.D. Salinger ten years ago and turned into a shelter for streetwalkers, and every year they put on a floor show to raise money for the scholarship fund. It was last night. My friends happened to be walking past the front door and they went in, paid fifty dollars, and there was Salinger onstage in a tux and black tie, the emcee, and according to them, he sang “Love Walked In” and did a nice little soft-shoe routine in the middle of it. A charming man with silvery hair. I always thought he was a recluse, but that’s New York for you. Full of surprises. |
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9/14/09 Otto could talk for an hour with only one or two thoughts to keep him company, and when people suggested he run for Congress, he said he’d be delighted. Otto campaigned on the back of a manure spreader. He said, “This is the first time I have spoken from a Republican platform.” |
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9/13/09 She was one of the Dark Lutherans, of the Haugean persuasion, who were in the majority in town. All the Norwegians were Lutherans, of course, even the atheists—it was a Lutheran God they did not believe in—but a chasm separated the Hauge Synod, or Dark Lutherans, who believed in the utter depravity of man and separation from worldly things and strict adherence to the literal truth of Scripture, and the Old Synod, or Happy Lutherans, who believed in splashing some water on babies and confirming the little kids and then not worrying about it, just come every Sunday and bring a hot dish. |
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9/12/09 Membership Week is pure irony on public radio: you try to raise money to pay for your wonderful programs by stopping your wonderful programs and making a horrible scraping and whining and wheedling noise—truly dreadful, awesomely boring, and yet I was always fond of it. Week in, week out, WSJO drifted along on audio feeds from NPR and taped concerts and long selections of recorded music, and then Membership Week came chugging in like a John Deere tractor, and everybody had to come out from behind the golden arras and dig potatoes for a few days. |
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9/11/09 It struck me, pulling up dandelions, how handsome they are, almost like marigolds, and how hard people work to coax along pansies and impatiens and here is a hardy perennial that keeps coming back no matter what. Maybe people have chosen the wrong side, and the tide of history is with the dandelion. |
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9/10/09 I hate talk radio. Especially public radio talk shows. I loathe them. Drowsy voices dithering and blithering, obsessive academics whittling their fine points, genteel bohemians with their Bambi worldview, the earnest schoolmarms, the murmury liberals, the ditsy New Agers, the plodding Luddites, the sad-eyed ladies of the lowland, all of them good and decent and progressive and well-read and deeply concerned. Concerned about children, about justice and equality, about the clouds in the clear blue sky. Everything they say is to demonstrate their Concern, to show their innate goodness, nothing they say comes from firsthand observation, they have no experience whatsoever. |
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9/9/09 The urge to be top dog is a bad urge. Inevitable tragedy. A sensible person seeks to be at peace, to read books, know the neighbors, take walks, enjoy his portion, live to be eighty, and wind up fat and happy, though a little wistful when the first coronary walks up and slugs him in the chest. Nobody is meant to be a star. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits. That is the Lake Wobegon view of life. |
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9/8/09 They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. |
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9/7/09 As the Irish have many words for rain, and the Inuit many words for snow, astronomers have many words for error. |
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9/6/09 One curious effect [of universal expansion] is that galaxies we can observe today will get redshifted beyond our detection in the future. Instead of seeing more of the contents of the universe as time passes, we will see less and less. The universe could become a lonely, dull, cold, dark place. This is a good reason to do this work now. In a few hundred billion years, perhaps we won’t be able to. |
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9/5/09 The reason the rich congregate in certain watering holes is because nobody really likes them except themselves, and sometimes not then. But the point of Aspen, Vail, Long Island, West Palm, Malibu, Gstaad, the Hotel du Cap and so on is in those places the super-rich can congregate and not feel too exceptional. These places take in a lot of money by providing very rich people the illusion of normalcy. |
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9/4/09 It is unwise to think that today’s best approximation to understanding the universe is really the whole story. The prevailing wisdom is always spoken in the same authoritative tone of voice, with the same degree of confidence. It’s the content that changes. |
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9/3/09 The cosmological constant is represented in general relativity by the Greek letter lambda. Einstein used lowercase λ but (to make it seem more important in an age of grade inflation) we now use the uppercase Λ. |
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9/2/09 I called the Michigan Physics Department. It was a strange encounter: everybody I called was in Moriond, France, at a ski resort for a very important conference on cosmology and particle physics. Undoubtedly they were studying the effects of powder snow on the gravitational descent of physicists. |
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9/1/09 I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes. |
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8/31/09 If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. |
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8/30/09 Most of the time I don’t believe in God, though I’m fascinated by the idea of intelligent design. Because if what we see around us are the fruits of God’s college sketch pad, what designs did this guy have that weren’t worth saving? If degenerative illness, mommies who eat their young, religious wars, and homeless children all made it past the rough outline stage, wasn’t it possible that we, by offering unequivocal gratitude instead of constructive criticism, were simply helping reinforce all his worst instincts? Weren’t we what AA would call his “enablers”? |
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8/29/09 It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top. |
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8/28/09 Remember, kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. |
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8/27/09 I could never change my mind after someone drew a line in the sand. It was the only time I ever had a shred of insight into what it was like to be George W. Bush. |
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8/26/09 There’s no way to totally protect yourself from loss. It’s the universe’s way of making room for you to get some new stuff. |
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8/25/09 Everything in Malibu cost one, if not two, dollars more than the identical item on the other side of the 101. It was as if the area’s merchants believed that every common household item was magically transformed into its more valuable duplicate when it came into contact with salt air, the sea breeze, and proximity to David Geffen’s driveway. |
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8/24/09 Things may come to those who wait ... but only the things left by those who hustle. |
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8/23/09 Theologians claimed that anger was a cancer and that hatred was one of the seven deadly sins. They were wrong. Anger was an elixir that cauterized sorrow and passivity and victimhood from the metabolism; it lit fires in the belly; it provided you with that deadening of the conscience that allowed you to look down on someone with iron sights and forget he descended from the same tree in a Mesopotamian savannah that you did. |
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8/22/09 This court has never held that the constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. |
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8/21/09 It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. |
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8/20/09 Cassandra had been given knowledge of the future and simultaneously condemned to a lifetime of being disbelieved and rejected. The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly—namely the conviction that they had already seen the show but could never pass on the lessons that they had learned from it—was not unlike Cassandra’s burden, except the anger and bitterness of old people was not the stuff of Homeric epics. |
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8/19/09 According to Nick, the only true sin in this country was financial failure. Respectability you bought with your checkbook. That was cynicism? The Kennedy family earned their fortune during Prohibition selling Bibles? Poor guys ran the United States Senate? A lot of American presidents graduated from city colleges in Blow Me, Idaho? |
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8/18/09 Comedy is instantaneous market research! You're chucking it out, seeing which way it mutates, seeing which mutations make it stronger and then killing off all the other parts. |
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8/17/09 There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all. |
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8/16/09 When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. |
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8/15/09 No one wins [in war]. Both sides lose. The Indians, so called hostiles, won the battle of the day, but lost their way of life. |
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8/14/09 Soon we saw that money going to women brought much more benefit to the family than money going to the men. So we changed our policy and gave a high priority to women. As a result, now 96% of our four million borrowers in Grameen Bank are women. |
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8/13/09 I will tell you King's First Law of Recognition: You never get it when you want it, and then when it comes, you get too much. |
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8/12/09 The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there. |
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8/11/09 Preston Sturges was too large for this smelly resort, and the big studios were scared to death of him. A man who was a triple threat (writing, directing, and producing!) kept them awake nights, and I'm positive they were all waiting for him to fall on his face so they could pounce on him and devour this terrible threat to their stingy talents... In this, alas, I was right. They pounced, and they got him good. But Preston knew the great days, when he was turning out marvelous pictures... those days when his can glowed like a port light from everyone kissing it! |
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8/10/09 Though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment. |
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8/9/09 Konrad Preysing, aka “The One Good German,” made thirteen separate presentations of Holocaust evidence to Pope Pius XII, who in 1941 announced that Nazi policies did not conflict with Catholic teachings. When Pius gets sanctified, I hope they cite that as his miracle. |
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8/8/09 Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know. |
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8/7/09 A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. |
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8/6/09 [Sharks’ brains] have stayed the same for 60 million years, while ours kept increasing in complexity until 150,000 years ago, at which point we became able to speak, and therefore human, and our evolution became technological instead of biological. There are two ways of looking at this. One is that sharks are vastly evolutionarily superior to humans, because if you think we’ll last 60 million years, you’re insane. The other is that we’re superior to sharks because they’ll almost certainly be extinct before we will, and their demise, like ours, will be thanks to us. These days a human’s a lot more likely to eat a shark than vice versa. |
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8/5/09 Think more money can’t buy you worse health care? Forget the endless studies showing that the U.S. spends twice as much per capita as any other country, with results outside the top thirty-six. Take a look at Michael Jackson. |
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8/4/09 I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back. |
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8/3/09 I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate. |
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8/2/09 If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. |
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8/1/09 As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. |
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7/31/09 “It smells terrible in here.” “Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs.” |
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7/30/09 Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal. |
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7/29/09 Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them. |
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7/28/09 The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with baited breath. |
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7/27/09 If you drink don't drive. Don't even putt. |
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7/26/09 Call on God, but row away from the rocks. |
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7/25/09 In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. |
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7/24/09 If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism. |
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7/23/09 Orrin Hatch was the keynote speaker at the last meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He sought me out because he was a fan. I was thinking he had confused me with someone else. |
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7/22/09 There were always financial crises. Someone would come out from the east and announce that the business was in deep trouble, and what would happen was that they'd reduce the number of matzo balls in Louis B. Mayer's chicken soup from three to two. Then they'd fire a couple of secretaries and feel virtuous. |
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7/21/09 Modern conservatism is defined by an Alice-through-the-looking-glass incoherence: small government except when it is growing larger than ever, fiscal restraint except when we are spending like Michael Jackson in a Disney gift shop, foreign-policy pragmatism except when we are trying to transform the Middle East. Indeed, sometimes it feels as if it is no longer defined by principles at all, nor by energy and ideas, but rather, by a limitless ability to feel put upon and slighted. To be a conservative these days is, or so they would have you believe, like being black in Birmingham in 1952. It is to be the victim of media, culture and law, which hate you just for being. |
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7/20/09 Now that’s the trouble with the damned Internet. It makes everyone an impulse shopper. Just a few years ago, if I read about a book that sounded interesting, I had to remember to look for it the next time I was in a bookstore, and by then I might already have determined that I could live without it. Or it might be out of stock, or I might spot-read a few pages and decide the hell with it. But now in an instant I’m on Amazon or Alibris, and in another instant I’ve bought the book, and before I’ve had time to think it through I’ve bought two more books I don’t want or need just to save on shipping charges. |
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7/19/09 I was talking about it with Lynne, and we agreed that Chaim Potok was a good writer, and that we’d both enjoyed his novel, My Name is Asher Lev, about a young artist from an ultra-orthodox family. “And there was a sequel,” I said, “but I can’t remember what he called it.” “Now My Name is Allen Lewis,” said Lynne, without a moment’s hesitation. |
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7/18/09 We were told more than once of a priest who walked all the way from his church in Germany, crossing the Alps en route to the Pyrenees, and then continuing all the way to Santiago—barefoot. I couldn’t begin to guess what he’d done to justify imposing such penance upon himself, but I suspect there’s a whole generation of altar boys who could shed light on the subject. |
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7/17/09 Some soft drink manufacturer launched a promotion a few years back featuring a different commemorative can for each of the fifty states. The idea was that you would buy the cans, drink their contents (or pour the stuff down the sewer, as you preferred), and then could collect the empties, displaying them proudly until the day your mother made you throw them out. Well, one fellow had collected all fifty, and instead of throwing them out he donated them to the local museum, and there they were, all fifty of the little darlings, looking for all the world like, well, like empty soft drink cans. There was something magnificently post-modern about them: they were a wonderful sight to behold, and the wonder lay in the fact that they were there. By themselves they were nothing; displayed as they were, they remained nothing, but nothing on a grand scale. |
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7/15/09 You know, it reminds me of what they used to say about Rembrandt—that in the course of his life he produced three hundred canvases, of which four hundred are in Europe and five hundred in the United States. |
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7/14/09 When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic. |
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7/13/09 Memory, you see, is an artful Ananias. I’ve become deeply suspicious of those cases in which a suppressed memory, recovered decades after the fact with the aid of a brilliant hypnotherapist, has resulted in an indictment for child molestation. Even conscious memories, I’ve found, are overly cooperative witnesses, quick to tell you what you want to hear. How much trust can one place in those wrestled from the unconscious? (And isn’t it remarkable how the same therapists keep on dredging such memories from one client after another?) |
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7/12/09 Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed. |
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7/11/09 Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. |
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7/10/09 Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet. |
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7/9/09 It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important. |
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7/8/09 Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. |
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7/7/09 Sarah Palin is the logical conclusion of the GOP’s “Southern strategy,” where ignorance is prized and yelling “liberalism” or “socialism” about any policy with which you disagree is perceived as a thoughtful and considered argument. What’s different about Palin is that, where the Atwaters and Roves and the politicians they served knew that these were the things you said to make your policies more palatable, Palin takes it as gospel. (Whatever you thought about George W. Bush, didn’t you think, deep down in your heart, that he knew he was being cynical about a lot of the crap he claimed to support?) |
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7/6/09 The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. |
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7/5/09 Sarah Palin's time in politics has been a train-wreck worthy of reality television. She's been investigated for abuse-of-power charges. She's spent $150,000 on clothes during the campaign. She defended her daughter's unwed-teen pregnancy as if it was some sort of cool conservative virtue. She's claimed to see Russia from her backyard. She could not name one newspaper or magazine she regularly reads when interviewed by Katie Couric. Most recently she's humiliatingly duked it out publicly with David Letterman. This is a woman who some would like us to believe can lead America in times of war, terrorism and global economic recession? Equipped to be Commander-in-Chief? To be our chief diplomat? I think not. And while we're at it, how she ever got her existing job is a fucking mystery. She makes George W. Bush appear downright cerebral. |
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7/4/09 I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. |
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7/3/09 The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. |
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7/2/09 The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. |
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7/1/09 Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. |
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6/30/09 There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. |
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6/29/09 American popular culture's triumphant appeal around the world is the product of several forces: First among them is this country's historic aversion to assigning distinct values to high and low culture. Some would say the result has been a pervasive Philistinism -- that, as Oscar Wilde put it, "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." |
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6/28/09 A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. |
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6/27/09 If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles. |
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6/26/09 In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. |
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6/25/09 All politicians should have 3 hats -- one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected. |
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6/24/09 I only take Viagra when I'm with more than one woman. |
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6/23/09 “I read a book that figured that part about the virgins [in the Koran] is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.” “They kill themselves for raisins?” “I’d love to see their faces.” |
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6/22/09 Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time. |
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6/21/09 I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. |
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6/20/09 I felt the urge to direct because I couldn't stomach what was being done with what I wrote. |
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6/19/09 Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. |
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6/18/09 Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels. |
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6/17/09 As you know, pidgins are a real mixture of this, that, and the other thing. You get a bit of English, a bit of German, a bit of Dutch—everything. And the grammar is simple in the extreme. Do you know that when Prince Charles went to address the Papua New Guinea legislative assembly—where the official language is pidgin—they introduced him formally as “Nambawan pikinini bilong Mrs. Kwin”? [Number one child who belongs to the Queen.] |
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6/16/09 Now, as she sat in the coffee room, waiting for James to come down from his office upstairs, she looked up at the Bellamy portraits on the wall above her table. Sean Connery looked out of one of them rather forbiddingly, but then he was perhaps a touch disapproving, which was why people in Scotland were so proud of him. Scots heroes were not meant to be benign in their outlook; they needed to be at least a little bit cross about something, preferably an injustice committed against them, individually or nationally, some time ago. Sean Connery certainly looked rather cross about something. Perhaps he was cross at having his portrait painted, in the way in which such people often look cross at having their photographs taken. Perhaps, thought Domenica, there were paparazzi portraitists, who lurked with their easels outside hotels and fashionable nightclubs and painted quick likenesses of well-known people as they left the building—absurd thought. |
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6/15/09 Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you start criticizing him, you’re a mile away and he’s got to run after you in his socks. |
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6/14/09 A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we’ve made of it all. |
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6/13/09 Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up. |
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6/12/09 The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. |
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6/11/09 I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. |
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6/10/09 We gave up some of our country to the white men, thinking that then we could have peace. We were mistaken. The white man would not let us alone. |
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6/9/09 I love playing bitches. There's a lot of bitch in every woman - a lot in every man. |
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6/8/09 He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death. |
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6/7/09 You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. |
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6/6/09 I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. |
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6/5/09 The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age. |
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6/4/09 Advertising is legalized lying. |
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6/3/09 Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies. |
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6/2/09 There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever. |
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6/1/09 Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day. |
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5/31/09 On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it. |
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5/30/09 Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument. |
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5/29/09 You can't teach an old dogma new tricks. |
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5/28/09 Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. |
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5/27/09 I have many regrets, and I'm sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret... if you have any sense, and if you don't regret them, maybe you're stupid. |
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5/26/09 Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. |
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5/25/09 First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down. |
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5/24/09 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy? |
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5/23/09 These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig. |
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5/22/09 I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. |
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5/21/09 I'd much rather be a woman than a man. Women can cry, they can wear cute clothes, and they're the first to be rescued off sinking ships. |
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5/20/09 Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke. |
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5//19/09 All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take. |
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5/18/09 I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. |
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5/17/09 Folks, there is a lot that isn't known yet about this swine flu, but there is one thing that we do know: the process that brought us the new flu is called evolution. It's not rocket science, but it is science. A virus is Darwinian behavior we can see in real time. We can see that it jumps on a host, procreates until the host is exhausted and then jumps on something new. Like Mel Gibson. |
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5/16/09 Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune. He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable. |
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5/15/09 The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public. Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country. |
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5/14/09 It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders. |
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5/13/09 I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes. |
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5/12/09 A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. |
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5/11/09 At one point, Republicans put forth a coherent, idealistic vision of America, one that summoned it to greatness. There was a profound belief in the dignity of the individual, a reverence for the Constitution and the founders who proposed it, a belief in doing whatever it took (including spending tax dollars to build a military second to none) to preserve the peace. Republican platforms preached prudence and the virtues of small business. Today, the Republican belief system has degenerated into an embarrassing hodgepodge that worships political victory more than ideas; supports massive deficits; plunges the nation into "just-in-case" wars without adequate troops, supplies or armor; dismisses constitutional strictures; and campaigns on a platform of turning national problem-solving over to "Joe the Plumber." It's hard to see how all that points the way to a reawakening of voters to trust in the GOP. |
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5/10/09 Creationism and Darwinism are not "opposing but equally legitimate theories" to be treated as such. This flu virus didn't make the leap from pigs to humans because God felt like fucking with Mexicans. It happened because, like I said, viruses adapt to survive. Just like all other organisms on Planet Earth. With the possible exception of the Republican National Committee. |
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5/9/09 Viruses are like the free market. You adapt to survive or you die. I mean, except for Citibank and AIG and Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, Bear Stearns... Okay, bad example. They're nothing like the free market. |
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5/8/09 If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words. |
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5/7/09 Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance. |
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5/6/09 Rich people march on Washington every day. |
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5/5/09 I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs. Nixon, but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back. |
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5/4/09 The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great. |
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5/3/09 The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible. |
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5/2/09 With my sunglasses on, I'm Jack Nicholson. Without them, I'm fat and 60. |
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5/1/09 Those who speak for what is left of the Republican Party diminish their ranks every time they do. On [Karl] Rove’s advice, they killed stimulus money for fighting pandemics like swine flu. They still follow the post-bunker missives of Dick Cheney, who has as much credibility on competent governing as the Octomom has on birth control. And now there is the exquisite irony that nearly half the Republicans in the only big state left in the Party of Lincoln – Texas – say they favor seceding from the Union. So much for America first. |
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4/30/09 Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law. And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes. Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party? |
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4/29/09 If someone tells you he is going to make a "realistic decision," you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad. |
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4/28/09 The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned Parenthood. And I would have to totally rethink my position on a border fence. |
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4/27/09 That's what you [Republican Party] are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him -- obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will. But it's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy. The healthy thing to do is to just get past it and learn to cherish the memories. You'll always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib. |
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4/26/09 Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met. |
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4/25/09 Old age means realizing you will never own all the dogs you wanted to. |
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4/24/09 If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of “The Elements of Style.” The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. |
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4/23/09 If the defendant [the government torturer] acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted with only general intent but not specific intent to cause pain. As a theoretical matter therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent. Furthermore, a showing that an individual acted with a good faith belief that his conduct would not produce a result that the law prohibits negates specific intent. 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee What the fuck ...? John Varley |
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4/22/09 Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a “razor blade business”—companies like Gillette gives you free razor blade handles and then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printer cartridges are the worst for that—the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale. |
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4/21/09 The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. |
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4/20/09 When you read Ann Coulter, you know you’re reading someone who would fuck a hippopotamus if she thought it would boost her Q rating. That’s a rare quality and it commands one’s attention. |
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4/19/09 Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. |
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4/18/09 Someone once told me that every minute a murder occurs, so I don't want to waste your time, I know you want to go back to work. |
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4/17/09 You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself. |
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4/16/09 Sometimes it's not easy to admit that you live in Florida. Last week, our state Senate boldly took the first step toward making it illegal for a person to have intimate relations with an animal. Although such a law might thin the dating pool in certain counties, it should ultimately serve to protect household pets and domestic livestock, which evidently are at far greater risk than most of us had imagined. |
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4/15/09 People will now go to films with subtitles, you know. They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail. Maybe the only good thing to come of it. |
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4/14/09 Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon. |
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4/13/09 You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. |
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4/12/09 I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars. |
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4/11/09 I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty. |
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4/10/09 If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity. |
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4/9/09 When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. |
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4/8/09 If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones. |
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4/7/09 The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? |
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4/6/09 Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine. |
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4/5/09 Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place. |
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4/4/09 In my country we go to prison first and then become President. |
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4/3/09 Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. |
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4/2/09 Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life. |
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4/1/09 I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast. |
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3/31/09 If you can take the hot lead enema, then you can cast the first stone. |
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3/30/09 I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall. |
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3/29/09 I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion. |
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3/28/09 In mainstream Spanish bichos means insects, but in Puerto Rico it means testicles, so when a pesticide maker promised to bring death to the bichos, Puerto Rican consumers were at least bemused, if not alarmed. Much the same happened when a maker of bread referred to its product as un bollo de pan and discovered that to Spanish-speaking Miamians of Cuban extraction that means a woman’s private parts. And when Perdue Chickens translated its slogan “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” into Spanish, it came out as the slightly less macho “It takes a sexually excited man to make a chicken sensual.” Never mind. Sales soared. |
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3/27/09 You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created. |
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3/26/09 “What is your name?” asked Lear. “Caius,” said Kent. “And whence do you hail?” “From Bonking, Sire.” “Well, yes, lad, as do we all,” said Lear, “but from what town?” “Bonking Ewe on Worms Head,” I offered with a shrug. “Wales …” |
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3/25/09 I’m not the superstitious type, which is why I don’t like superstitious people. They’re bad luck. |
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3/24/09 New FOIA requests will enjoy "a clear presumption" that "in the face of doubt, openness prevails." Investigative journalists will now be able to use FOIA to uncover Bush Administration officials' nefarious deeds, forcing Obama's Justice Department to prosecute. Should they waterboard Rumsfeld? Only if it's on pay-per-view. |
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3/23/09 He’s always asking: "Is that new? I haven’t seen that before." It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet. Michelle Obama |
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3/22/09 Did you know, in Portugal they canonize a saint by actually shooting him out of a cannon? |
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3/21/09 She looked around the bar. It was a long, narrow room, decorated in the obligatory Danish minimalist style, which meant that there was no furniture. She had always thought that minimalism should have been the cheapest style available, because it involved nothing, but in fact it was the most expensive. The empty spaces in Danish minimalism were what cost the money. |
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3/20/09 “Come in, nuncle. Take some shelter under a shrub, if only to take the sting out of the rain.” “I need no shelter. Let nature take her naked revenge.” “Fine, then,” said I. “Then you won’t be needing this.” I took the old man’s heavy fur cape, tossing him my sodden woolen cloak, and retreated to my shrubbery and the relative shelter of the animal skin. “Hey?” said Lear, bewildered. “Go on,” said I. “Crack the sky, fry your old head, mash your balls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’ll prompt you if you lose your place.” And off he went again: “Mighty Thor, send your thunderbolts to cease this weary heart! “Neptune’s waves, beat these limbs from their joints! “Hecate’s claws, tear my liver and sup upon my soul! “Baal, blast my bowels from their unhealthy home! “Jupiter, strew the land with my shredded muscle!” The old man stopped his tirade for a moment and the madness went out of his eyes. He looked to me. “It’s really fucking cold out here.” “Like being struck by a bolt of the bloody obvious on the road to Damascus, innit, nuncle?” |
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3/19/09 Clarke’s Laws: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sir Arthur C Clarke |
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3/18/09 Most people don’t understand psychopathy very well. They think of the psychopath as the Hitchcockian villain—staring eyes and all the rest—whereas they’re really rather mundane people, and there are rather more of them than we would imagine. Do you know anybody who’s consistently selfish? Do you know anybody who doesn’t seem troubled if he upsets somebody else—who’ll use other people? Cold inside? Do you know anybody like that? … Then it’s possible that that person is a psychopath. |
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3/17/09 Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It's abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word "justice," for it's a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women's suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few. |
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3/16/09 “Oh, it will be worth it, I assure you.” Her pretty eyes widened, and she lowered her voice. “It’s not definite yet, but I have it on good authority that the vice president is scheduled to attend.” “Really? The vice president?” Pause. “Do you have a fork, by any chance?” “A fork?” “Yeah, because I’d sooner stick a fork in my eye than go to an event that the vice president is scheduled to attend.” |
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3/15/09 “Pocket, you have traveled the land. Tell me what it is like to be a peasant.” “Well, Milady, I have never been a peasant, strictly speaking, but for the most part, I’m told it’s wake early, work hard, suffer hunger, catch the plague, and die. Then get up the next morning and do it all again.” “Every day?” “Well, if you’re a Christian—on Sunday you get up early, go to church, suffer hunger until you have a big meal of barley and swill, then catch the plague and die.” “Hunger? Is that why they seem so wretched and unhappy?” “That would be one of the reasons. But there’s much to be said for hard work, disease, run-of-the-mill suffering, and the odd witch burning or virgin sacrifice, depending on your faith.” “If they’re hungry, why don’t they just eat something?” |
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3/14/09 Stephen King’s 10 favorite adaptations of his own works. In alphabetical order:
Apt Pupil |
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3/13/09 Kyle, my boy, look at it this way. Our biggest client is BXL, the seventh-largest company in the world, sales last year of $200 billion. Very smart businessmen who have a budget for everything. They live by budgets. They are fanatics about budgets. Last year their budget for legal fees was one percent of their total sales, or about $2 billion. We didn't get all of that because they use twenty different law firms around the world, but we got our share. Guess what happens if they don't spend the amount they budget, if their legal fees fall short? Their in-house lawyers monitor our billings, and if our numbers are low, they call up and raise hell. What are we, the lawyers, doing wrong? Aren't we properly protecting them? The point is, they expect to spend the money. If we don't take it, then it screws up their budgets, they get worried, and maybe they start looking around for another firm, one that will work harder at billing them. You follow? |
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3/12/09 Have the Republicans reverted to a party with so little to say that they are reduced to making feeble jabs at Michelle Obama's biceps? Are they so afraid of the new Obama era that the First Lady's arms are a enough of a symbol of power that they cower before them? That can be the only explanation for Republican lite David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, to tell his fellow Times columnist Maureen Dowd that Michelle Obama should put away her arms, "Thunder and Lightning." Thunder and lightning? Has he actually named the biceps that offend him? Brooks also had the nerve to say that "sometimes I think half the reason Obama ran for president is so Michelle would have a platform to show off her biceps." If that doesn't sound like a sore loser running scared, then I don't know what does. |
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3/11/09 When your new leader Rush Limbaugh calls for President Obama to fail he's calling for more flag-draped coffins. Limbaugh is the new "Hanoi Jane." |
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3/10/09 I wanted to convey the sort of surface resentment the English seem to have for the French, and to be fair, the French for the English. As one English friend explained to me, “Oh yes, we hate the French, but we don’t want anyone else to hate them. They are ours. We will fight to the death to preserve them so we can continue to hate them.” I don’t care if that’s true or not, I thought it was funny. Or as one French acquaintance put it, “All Englishmen are gay; some simply don’t know it and sleep with women.” I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but I thought it was funny. The fucking French are great, aren’t they? |
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3/9/09 From Fool (The true story of King Lear as told by Pocket, the Fool.) PART TWO: Soon a whole guild of low-priced shrine keepers around Europe named their own Pope—Boldface the Relatively Shameless, Discount Pope of Prague. The price war was on. If the Dutch pope would give you a hundred years out of purgatory for a shilling and a ferryman’s ticket, the Discount Pope would let you out for two hundred years and send you home with the femur of a minor saint and a splinter of the True Cross. The Retail Pope would offer cheesy bacon toppings on the Host with communion and the Discount Pope would counter with topless-nun night for midnight mass. It came to a head, though, when St. Matthew appeared in a vision to the Retail Pope, telling him that the faithful were more interested in the quality of their religious experience, not just the quantity. Thus inspired, the Retail Pope moved Christmas to June when the weather wasn’t so shit for shopping, and the Discount Pope, not realizing the game had changed, responded by forgiving hell altogether for anyone who gave a priest a hand job. Without hell, there was no fear, and without fear, there was no further need for the Church to supply redemption, and more important, no means for the Church to modify behavior. The Discount faithful defected in droves, either to the Retail branch of the Church, or to a dozen different pagan sects. Why not get pissed and dance naked around a pole all Sabbath if the worst of it was a rash on the naughty bits and the dropping of the odd bastard now and then? Pope Boldface was burned in a wicker man the next Beltane and cats shat on his ashes. |
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3/8/09 For the truth is, however admirable mindfulness may be, however much peace, grounding, stability and self-acceptance it can bring, as an experience to be shared, it’s stultifyingly boring. |
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3/7/09 The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. |
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3/6/09 I felt pretty comfortable with Westerns, apart from the fact I couldn't ride. |
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3/5/09 These banks are hurting. I opened a new account, and the lady asked me for a toaster. |
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3/4/09 Did you hear this? Disney is laying off employees at their theme parks. All 101 Dalmatians are missing, and they're now serving something called Korean barbecue. |
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3/3/09 The Obama administration, says Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, believes “that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go.” So do we all. But what we have now isn’t private enterprise, it’s lemon socialism: banks get the upside but taxpayers bear the risks. And it’s perpetuating zombie banks, blocking economic recovery. |
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3/2/09 But since I moved to L.A., I've discovered that liberals hate science just as much as conservatives, and they talk about it a lot more. Liberals have an irrational fear of inoculation and genetically engineered food, no matter how conclusive the science is on these topics. They believe that the body needs to be detoxified with foot pads, colonics, mud wraps and maple-syrup-and-cayenne-pepper fasts. They take echinacea and Emergen-C, heal themselves with crystals and magnets, and believe that energy flows through different "centers" of their bodies. They practice, I swear, a form of healing massage called reiki in which the masseuse usually doesn't even touch you. I believe my wife and I have a reiki marriage. |
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3/1/09 From Fool (The true story of King Lear as told by Pocket, the Fool.) PART ONE: I juggled apples and sang a little song about monkeys. I said, “Two popes are shagging a camel behind a mosque, when this Saracen comes up—” “There is only one, true pope!” shouted Cornwall, great tower of malignant smegma that he is. “It’s a jest, you wanker,” said I. “Suspend fucking disbelief for a bit, would you?” He was right, in a way (although not for the purpose of the camel bit). For the last year there had been only one pope, in the holy city of Amsterdam. But for the prior fifty years there had been two popes, the Retail Pope and the Discount Pope. After the Thirteenth Holy Crusade, when it was decided that to avoid future strife, the birthplace of Jesus would be moved to a different city every four years, holy shrines lost their geographical importance. There arose a great price war in the Church, with shrines offering pilgrims dispensation at varying competitive rates. Now there didn’t need to be a miracle declared on the spot; anywhere could basically be declared a holy spot, and often was. Lourdes could still dispensation coupons with the healing waters—but some bloke in Puddinghoe could plant some pansies and hawk, “Jesus had a wee right on this very spot when he was a lad—two pennies and a spliff of Cardiff Chronic’ll get you out o’ Purgatory for an eon, mate.” (CONTINUED NEXT SUNDAY) |
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2/28/09 I once had a reviewer take me to task for writing awkward prose, and the passage he cited was one of my characters quoting Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience.” You don’t get many moments in life; pointing that out to the reviewer was one of mine. |
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2/27/09 “Well, If you can’t be persuaded, let us have a consult,” said Rosemary. “Parsley, Sage? A moment?” She waved the other witches over to an old oak where they whispered. “Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary?” said Kent. “What, no Thyme?” Rosemary wheeled on him. “Oh, we’ve got the time if you’ve got the inclination, handsome.” |
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2/26/09 And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does Bobby Jindal really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens. The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead. |
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2/25/09 What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups. And the road to that system runs through nationalization. |
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2/24/09 Some of our nation's largest banks have been described this week as dead men walking. The New York Times says they are insolvent, and here's the thing: Nobody will say the names of the banks, because if you say the names, their stock will tank even worse. But here's a hint. One of them rhymes with Shittibank, and one of them rhymes with Skank of America. |
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2/23/09 I'm a little nervous. I've been doing a show now since 1993 with "Politically Incorrect." We moved over here to HBO with "Real Time" in 2003, and in all that time I've never done a show where the president wasn't either a horny hillbilly or an illiterate dumbass. It hasn't sunk in yet that Obama is president. I'm still writing "Fuck George Bush" on my checks. He's been in office for a month and he's signed the stimulus package, he's closing Guantanamo Bay, ordered the planning of our withdrawing from Iraq ... it's like he's spraying the country with a giant can of Bush-Be-Gone. |
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2/22/09 Revolutionaries are not easy people. The fierce purpose that drives men to take on causes that frighten others does not admit of flexibility. |
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2/21/09 I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain. |
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2/20/09 When you look at the state of the world economy, indeed in how much we have lost in just four months, the fact is we can't afford to wait four years to fix things. If the Obama stimulus fails, if the economy keeps slipping, millions of Americans who are teetering now will fall off the economic cliff. If we don't get it right this time, we have to keep trying and trying. We can't wait till 2013 for a Republican to ride into town touting tax cuts -- what else? -- as the solution. So whether he realizes it or not, when Limbaugh says he hopes Obama fails, he is hoping for an economic disaster of near-apocalyptic proportions. In my book, that makes him a traitor to the American people, at least those who aren't in the top 1 percent. |
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2/19/09 If Republican politicians are so deeply opposed to President Obama's economic recovery plan, they should refuse to take the money. After all, if you think all that federal spending is damaging, there are easy ways to reduce it: Don't take federal money. |
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2/18/09 We've become vulnerable everywhere there's oil. The Venezuelans hate us. The Gulf of Mexico is subject to hurricanes. Aside from our disaster in Iraq, the Middle East is shadowed by bin Laden, Sunni-Shiite rivalries, and the threat of a nuclear Iran empowering terrorists. And we've got no real program to wean us from foreign oil. We've become the equivalent of a crack-addicted whore, ready to turn tricks for anyone who can give us a fix. |