3/11/10

War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. I'm trying to unpack why, to look at what it means to be a hero in the context of 21st-century combat.

Kathryn Bigelow

3/10/10

I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off The Hurt Locker and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

Kathryn Bigelow

3/9/10

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.

Kathryn Bigelow

3/8/10

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do/ not/ date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

Roger Ebert

3/7/10

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Napoleon Bonaparte

3/6/10

And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life: If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum … But I have never done that. (The heart of my theory has Puritan roots: If you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work.)

Carol O’Connell

3/5/10

I knew from the off that this series was going to get me into all sorts of shite in Ireland and so went completely for broke.

Jack’s mother.

Like Italians and the other Europeans, we love our mothers … Never no mind she might be the biggest bitch who ever walked the planet, Irish boys love their mammy.

Fook that.

Jack loathed his mother and never tried to hide it. She was everything that was worst about our country.

Pious

Sanctimonious

A hypocrite

And a mouth on her

And worst of all … long-suffering, though she instigated most of the suffering.

Ken Bruen

3/4/10

Serge Storms’ commencement speech to a Florida kindergarten class, Part 2:

Don’t try to be different—that will make you different.

Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon.

Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush.

Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything.

When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise.

Go fly a kite—seriously.

Each new year at school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to—and talk to him.

Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family, and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work.

Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion.

Hang onto your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keeping looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

Tim Dorsey

3/3/10

Serge Storms’ commencement speech to a Florida kindergarten class, Part 1:

Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money or influence. Then you must.

If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say.

Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in.

Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger.

Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind.

Don’t follow the leader.

Tim Dorsey

3/2/10

“Look, there’s an osprey. It’s got a fish in its claws. Every time I see an osprey flying with a fish, I always think: Fish lives entire life in the sea, then at the end, he’s looking down at everything from hundreds of feet up, thinking, ‘Oh, now I get it.’”

Tim Dorsey

3/1/10

New Hampshire’s trademark is the Old Man of the Mountain, an uncanny, eons-old geological rock formation high up the side of Franconia Notch. Its profile is ubiquitous: postage stamps, the state quarter, a thousand highway signs, flags, welcome centers, the capitol rotunda, history books, maps, pot holders, paperweights, snow globes, and every tourist brochure ever printed. Residents proudly identify with the Old Man in a fierce emotional bond, much like Parisians and the Eiffel Tower or Texans and the Alamo. And on May 3, 2003, the face slid off the mountain and disintegrated.

Tim Dorsey

2/28/10

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

George Bernard Shaw

2/27/10

The southern border of New Hampshire is guarded by a string of sales-tax-free state liquor stores, militarily positioned like pillboxes. Their parking lots are full of Massachusetts plates, half customers, half Massachusetts alcohol agents who follow residents back over the commonwealth line for citations. Except they can’t, because New Hampshire agents block them in until customers make a clean getaway. Such is the delicate fabric of the republic, no more evident than in a state with the motto “Live Free or Die” stamped on its license plates, which comedians note are manufactured in prison.

Tim Dorsey

2/26/10

As the saying goes, the difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits.

Tim Dorsey

2/25/10

It was the Americans who discovered Mma Ramotswe. I owe everything to my American readers, who bought the books in large numbers. Like any country, the United States has its faults, but at heart Americans are a kind and generous-spirited people, and the country remains a beacon in the darkness of this world.

Alexander McCall Smith

2/24/10

Most important: my book would feature no effete amateur prancing about as he shows up the pros. Because I detest books that treat murder like a parlor game. You know the type: plummy-voiced, tuxedoed twits with all the character depth of a sandwich sign huff-huffing in the parlor as a body molders yards away.

Jonathan Kellerman

2/23/10

To my publisher’s amazement, When the Bough Breaks earned a hefty (by 1985 standards) paperback sale and garnered rave reviews, including a gracious showcase by the eminent British-born critic John Gross (whose departure from the New York Times has rendered that tedious periodical sorely lacking in sparkling critical talent.) Mr. Gross featured my book in a Times daily review along with write-ups of new novels by Dick Francis and John D. MacDonald. Which is kind of like opening for the Beatles.

Jonathan Kellerman

2/22/10

There are only two things in this world that I’m fairly sure about. That E=mc², and man’s capacity for folly. And I’m not that certain about the first.”

Albert Einstein

2/21/10

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

Robert Green Ingersoll

2/20/10

“Well, you remember what General Sheridan said.”

“What’d old Phil say?”

“Said if he owned Texas and hell, he’d live in hell and rent out Texas. And you know what? People being what they are, he would find tenants.”

William Humphrey

2/19/10

After supper they played poker. My grandfather lost. Then the daylight faded and they made music in the gloaming. They sang of Lillian the dog-faced lady whose bark was worse than her bite. Of that hometown gal we all used to know who now was selling huh-what she used to give away-hay. Of the growing girl who to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw” swore she wasn’t gonna do it for a nickel anymore, wasn’t gonna be just an ordinary whore, fifteen cents was gonna be her new price—give her a quarter and she’d do it twice.

William Humphrey

2/18/10

To go West! The West is the one unfixed pole of the compass. It has moved with man, always retreating before him. What was once the West is now the East. The West lies on the other side of that last range of hills, where the day still lingers, where the sun is still shining after it has set in the East, where there is still another hour to correct one’s mistakes or begin a new project before nightfall. The West is where people go to start over, or to start out, the land of losers and beginners, of promise and of recovery. The West is unfenced, unfettered, unencrusted with history. Where never is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day. A man’s country. God’s country. Lit by a glow which even a blind man might see.

William Humphrey

2/17/10

“Country opening up fast, is it?”

“Yes, well I’m in the business of enclosing it again once it’s opened up. I took orders for seventeen thousand tons of barb wire this trip. But I wouldn’t hardly call it crowded yet. They say there that when you set off to visit your neighbor you ride a pregnant mare so as to have a way of getting back home again.”

William Humphrey

2/16/10

“I never seen anything like it,” my grandfather said. “Many a summer afternoon I’ve set on the creek bank alongside of that old woman, used the same bait, same size hook, set my bobber to the same depth as she set hers, and she would be hauling in fish like that boy yo-yoing over there, and I would never get a nibble. Why, in clear water—now you all may not believe this, but in clear water I have seen fish steal her bait and sneak off to eat it, then just give up and turn around and come back and swallow the bare hook!”

William Humphrey

2/15/10

For their efforts in recovering the manuscript of this book, left aboard the Rome-Milan Express on March 15, 1963, the author wishes to thank the Italian National Railways, and in particular Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Statione Termini in Rome.

William Humphrey

2/14/10

If I had been the Virgin Mary, I would have said "No."

Margaret Smith

2/13/10

Angus, dispirited by the realisation that Big Lou could not reasonably be expected to accept one or more of his boisterous litter of puppies, looked down into his coffee. And a coffee cup, as we all know, is not something that it pays to look into if one is searching for meaning beyond meaning; coffee, in all its forms, looks murky and gives little comfort to one who hopes to see something in it. Unlike tea, which allows one to glimpse something of what lies beneath the surface, usually more tea.

Alexander McCall Smith

2/12/10

Charlie laughed. “I see what you mean,” he said. “But no, she got married here in Edinburgh. To her archaeologist husband. She said that an archaeologist was an ideal husband, as the older the wife became, the more interested he would be in her.”

Alexander McCall Smith

2/11/10

Another friend, having despaired of finding a full-sized husband, had settled for a man who was so thin as to be almost invisible when viewed from the side. He had himself been keen to marry, but had never found anybody, probably, Domenica thought, because nobody had ever actually seen him.

Alexander McCall Smith

2/10/10

I am often thanked by people for inventing the term traditionally built. The people who give me thanks for this are often traditionally built themselves.

Alexander McCall Smith

2/9/10

I sat down and wrote a book-length Sherlock Holmes-Nero Wolfe pastiche that I entitled Recipe for Murder. It was, granted, a mystery, and so would be outside the main thrust of my serious work—in fact, I wrote it under the pen name of Dan Sherb. I never really thought that this novel would be published, either. In fact, after I’d finished it, I showed it to one or two readers, who were universally enthusiastic (parents tend to be!). Then I put the manuscript in my sock drawer and forgot about it.

John Lescroart

2/8/10

It seemed to me that there was a distinction between [Ross] Macdonald (and some of his peers) and that of certain British crime writers of a certain vintage. If one reads the classic “Golden Age” British crime novels, one again and again encounters individuals who suffer and die because they are bad. Few nice people die in Agatha Christie’s novels. Most of them are adulterers or thieves or blackmailers. They bring their deaths upon themselves. We are not asked to feel pity for them or empathy. Their killers have to be found and punished as a matter of social order rather than because the murders they have committed diminish us all as human beings, or as an effort as recompense for the deaths of innocents.

John Connolly

2/7/10

There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave.

Louis Kronenberger

2/6/10

In my view, madness is a place. You go. You come back. And I think we all take turns being the mental patient. Without a touch of crazy, literature can be a desolate place. In the current climate of careful speech, even fearful speech, smoke-free film scripts, thought-free songs, and child-proof locks on American minds, the oft-repeated lament of the arts is “Where have all those wonderful madmen gone?”

Carol O’Connell

2/5/10

“Do you know that at the racetracks in Delaware, the ones with slot machines, they find dozens of adult diapers in the trash every day?” she asks suddenly. “Think about it. There are people who are so crazed for slots that they wear Depends, lest they have to give up a “hot” machine. Do you think Bill Bennett wore Depends?” Monaghan, who assumes that others can follow her often jumpy train of thought, has moved on to the former secretary of education, reported to have had an almost pathological addiction to slot machines, even as he made millions advocating family values.

Laura Lippman

2/4/10

I went to work in the theater, which back then featured plenty of experimental theater, some of it good, most of it awful, and I developed a growing contempt for those who saw their minimal audiences as badges of honor.

“The public is too stupid to understand us,” they would say.

I hated that attitude. To me, entertainment was a transaction. You do it, they watch it, then it exists. Like a Zen question: If you put on a show and nobody comes, have you in fact put on a show at all?

Lee Child

2/3/10

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures. Roy Lichtenstein

2/2/10

It is only the ignorant who despise education. Publilius Syrus

2/1/10

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

Miguel de Cervantes

1/31/10

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

H.L. Mencken

1/30/10

Cane Toads: The Conquest had its world premiere at Sundance on Tuesday night before an audience that roared with delight at the amphibians' antics. The reception fulfilled the expectations of filmmaker Mark Lewis, who called it "just like Avatar, except with toads." ..... One of Cane Toads' 3-D elements that Lewis is proudest of takes some explaining. Dogs, it seems, have learned to tip over the toad and lick its stomach until it excretes a substance that has a hallucinogenic effect. So the film offers what Lewis calls "the first 3-D dog acid trip sequence in cinema history."

Kenneth Turan

1/29/10

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw

1/28/10

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Samuel Goldwyn

1/27/10

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

1/26/10

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

Niels Bohr

1/25/10

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't even realize it: today, John Roberts just cut their throats too. So, with critics silenced or bought off, and even the town assessor who lives next door to you elected to office with campaign funds 99.9 percent drawn from corporate coffers — what are you going to do about it?

Keith Olbermann

1/24/10

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

Annie Dillard

1/23/10

I thought my life would seem more interesting with a musical score and a laugh track.

Bill Watterson

1/22/10

Life is like a movie - since there aren't any commercial breaks, you have to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of it.

Garry Trudeau

1/21/10

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

Agatha Christie

1/20/10

She saw the buttons on the sleeve of his jacket, with their crown motif. The King’s reach was a wide one—down to this officer’s buttons. Having the symbol of another on one’s buttons meant that the other owned you. A free man—a really free man—could not carry the symbol of another on his clothing.

Alexander McCall Smith

1/19/10

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

Horace Walpole

1/18/10

In America now there is this phenomenon called helicopter parenting, where you're hovering over your child for the whole time. Parents there view their job as being to make sure their kid never has a moment of unhappiness. Of course, as a parent myself, I can understand the urge, but I don't know whether it would be healthy – or possible.

Lemony Snicket

1/17/10

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins

1/16/10

Children hate scenery. It just sits there. Scenery doesn’t make goofy faces or have any candy or pay any attention to children at all. Scenery doesn’t even cry when you hog the whole backseat. Say to your kids, “Oh, look, there’s ________! Gosh, that’s so ______!” And they’ll fill in the blanks:

P.J. O’Rourke

1/15/10

Then it was back on the Grand Trunk to Varanasi, the most holy place in India, where millions of pilgrims come to wash themselves in the purifying Ganges and also to cremate corpses in it. Everybody got up at five in the morning to see this done except me. I figured that when it came to scary things in the water, the hotel coffee would do.

P.J. O’Rourke

1/14/10

The motorcycle is a device created by the team of God and Darwin to rid the world of useless young males.

P.J. O’Rourke

1/13/10

Gambling is so pervasive in Nevada that maybe the state should just go the whole hog. There’d be gum machines that dispensed chewing tobacco if you lost. You could gamble for the toilet paper in public bathroom stalls. And fill out Keno cards in an attempt to win cancer therapy at the hospital.

P.J. O’Rourke

1/12/10

But in Beverly Hills and Bel Air you didn’t have a job. You had a deal. You made a deal by impressing someone who used that deal to impress someone else who, in turn, impressed you. The way to get this chain of impressiveness started was with an expensive car. Thus Range Rovers that had seen dirt only in plant store windows, 1940s Chrysler Town and Country convertibles with tops down and after-market A/C units going full blast, Shelby Cobras owing their racing pedigrees to Ma Maison parking attendants, and Lamborghini Countaches that had had their highest speeds clocked by repo men on their way back to the dealership.

P.J. O’Rourke

1/11/10

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

Benjamin Franklin

1/10/10

An early missionary [to Baja California] Father Juan de Ugarte, once preached to the natives on the agonies of Hell. His congregation began to laugh. Father Ugarte asked them what was funny, and an old Indian replied, “There must be no lack of firewood in Hell. So Hell is a better place than this. We would be wise to go there.”

P.J. O'Rourke

1/9/10

The road is a trash basket, as all the roads in India are. And the road is the john. You never have to wonder where the toilet is in India, you’re standing on it. The back of a long-distance bus had a sign in Hindi and an elaborate pictogram, the import of which was Don’t crap on the pavement, and wash your hands after you do.

P.J. O'Rourke

1/8/10

The Jeep is inadequate as a pickup, drafty as a sedan, oversized as an ATV, and lacks sufficient cargo space to be an SUV. True, Jeeps will go almost everyplace but, if you think about it, Jeeps go most everyplace there’s no reason to go.

P.J. O'Rourke

1/7/10

Americans love media attention. Being on television so defines American life that there is now more “reality TV” than there is discernable reality. SUVs are easier for television helicopters to spot during the live televised car chases that all Americans dream of being featured on.

P.J. O'Rourke

1/6/10

There was no premarital sex in American prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine. You couldn’t sneak a girl into the rec room of your house because your mom and dad were unable to commute so they were home all day working on the farm. And your farmhouse didn’t have a rec room because recreation had not yet been discovered due to all the farmwork. You could take a girl out in a buggy, but it was hard to get her in the mood to let you bust into her corset because the two of you were seated facing a horse rectum. It spoils the atmosphere.

P.J. O'Rourke

1/5/10

The woman who had overheard this conversation had been staring at the page of her book – staring but not reading. She had heard every word and now she looked very discreetly in their direction and saw the two of them quite still, quite silent, sunk in their thoughts. She transferred her gaze back to the words on the page before her, but she could no longer concentrate. It had nothing to do with her, of course – the business of others. But now she willed with all her heart that this stranger into whose life she had unwittingly strayed should listen to every word that the little boy had said. And when she glanced again, and saw the expression on the man’s face, she knew that he would.

Alexander McCall Smith

1/4/10

I remember that the single most vicious letter I ever read was the letter Hemingway wrote Scribners when they asked him to give a blurb for From Here to Eternity. It’s there, in the Selected Letters for all to read, an example of a once great writer at his very worst. I doubt that he ever forgave Scribners for publishing James Jones in the first place. War, as Hemingway saw it, belonged to him.

Larry McMurtry

1/3/10

Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?

Lily Tomlin

1/2/10

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

Dave Hickey

1/1/10

Longevities:

I have had the same postal box for sixty-seven years: Box 552, Archer City, Texas.

My family’s first phone number in Archer City was 9.

On the ranch we still fed cattle out of a wagon.

I write on a typewriter.

I come, not just from a different time, but from a different era.

Larry McMurtry

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.

Lewis Carroll

12/30/09

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

 

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

12/29/09

The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

12/28/09

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

12/27/09

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

Edmund Burke

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."

Loren D Estleman

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.

Berkeley Breathed

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.

Don Winslow

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.

Don Winslow

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.”

Don Winslow

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.

P.J O'Rourke

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.

Isaac Asimov

12/19/09

I was raised to be charming, not sincere.

Stephen Sondheim

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.

P.J O'Rourke

12/17/09

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Lewis Carroll

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.

Garrison Keillor

12/15/09

Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.

Whoopi Goldberg

12/14/09

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.

Robert Benchley

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.

Terry Pratchett

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.

Frank Herbert

12/11/09

When he plays his drums, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
Let’s break his thumbs.
I played my drum for Him, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
He told me, beat it, Jim, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
Said the shepherd to the little lamb,
I have a gift to bring, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
A noose and scaffolding, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
I wish this song were done, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
Go get my gun …

Garrison Keillor

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.

Philip K. Dick

12/9/09

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

Stanley Kubrick

12/8/09

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Terry Pratchett

12/7/09

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Ogden Nash

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.”

Garrison Keillor

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.

John Hughes

12/4/09

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce

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!

John Hughes

12/2/09

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

Georgia O'Keeffe

12/1/09

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

Philip K. Dick

11/30/09

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Joseph Campbell

11/28/09

Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Ambrose Bierce

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?

Dustin Hoffman

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.

Jon Stewart

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.

Dustin Hoffman

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.

E.L. Doctorow

11/23/09

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Muhammad Ali

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Jack Kerouac

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.

Thomas Carlyle

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.

Ogden Nash

11/18/09

The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.

Stephen Sondheim

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?

John Irving

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.

Don Winslow

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

E.L. Doctorow

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.

Jim Carrey

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.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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.

Hunter S. Thompson

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.

Dennis Lehane

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.

Dennis Lehane

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
squares it with God, then I got the whole rest of the day to chase more pussy, skim more money – whatever – and the odds are still on my side I go to heaven. I couldn't believe it when the nuns first told me about this, I thought it was so great."

Don Winslow

11/7/09

If some company is too big to fail, then it’s too big to exist. Break it up.

Bob Herbert

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.

Don Winslow

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.

Oscar "Happy" Felsch

11/4/09

Without losers, where would the winners be?

Casey Stengel

11/3/09

To get along with me, don't increase my tension.

Ty Cobb

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.

Roger Ebert

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.

Al Gallagher

10/31/09

The sun don't shine on the same dog's ass all the time.

Catfish Hunter

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.

Mickey Mantle

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.

Bill Spaceman Lee

10/28/09

The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws.

Rick Wise

10/27/09

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.

George F. Will

10/26/09

What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series? No cubs.

Harry Caray

10/25/09

The Good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong right arm, a good body, and a weak mind.

Dizzy Dean

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.

Mickey Mantle

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

10/22/09

Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.

Casey Stengel

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.

Joe DiMaggio

10/20/09

Hating the New York Yankees is as American as apple pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax.

Mike Royko

10/19/09

I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice.

Casey Stengel

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

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."

James Grippando

10/16/09

The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second class citizen to a second class immortal.

Satchel Paige

10/15/09

The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.

Stephen Sondheim

10/14/09

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.

Ogden Nash

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.

Ogden Nash

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.

Ogden Nash

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.”

Joe R Lansdale

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.

Ogden Nash

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.

Ted Turner

10/8/09

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

Brendan Behan

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.

Hunter S. Thompson

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.

Orson Welles

10/5/09

Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.

Bob Dylan

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.”

Joe R Lansdale

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.

Cher

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.

Dean Koontz

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.

Dolly Parton

9/30/09

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

Bob Dylan

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.

Ken Burns

9/28/09

That is where the power, opportunity, and choice come from - when you have money. Money equals opportunity. There is no question.

Billie Jean King

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.”

Joe R Lansdale

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.

Joe R Lansdale

9/25/09

If it cost a dollar to fart I’d have to sweat instead.

Joe R Lansdale

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.

Dennis Baron

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.

Dennis Baron

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.

Joe R Lansdale

9/21/09

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

Gore Vidal

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.

Garrison Keillor

9/19/09

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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!”

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Garrison Keillor

9/16/09

On her résumé, she listed the Sam Houston Institute of Technology. I like jokes like that from a woman.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.”

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Garrison Keillor

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.

Ernest Hemingway

9/7/09

As the Irish have many words for rain, and the Inuit many words for snow, astronomers have many words for error.

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Larry McMurtry

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.

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Robert P. Kirshner

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.

Ernest Hemingway

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.

Desmond Tutu

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”?

Merrill Markoe

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.

Hunter S. Thompson

8/28/09

Remember, kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant.

Stephen Colbert

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.

Merrill Markoe

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.

Merrill Markoe

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.

Merrill Markoe

8/24/09

Things may come to those who wait ... but only the things left by those who hustle.

Abraham Lincoln

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.

James Lee Burke

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.

Antonin Scalia

8/21/09

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Leo Tolstoy

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.

James Lee Burke

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?

James Lee Burke

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.

Dara O'Briain

8/17/09

There's a lot to be said for being nouveau riche, and the Reagans mean to say it all.

Gore Vidal

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.

Desmond Tutu

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.

Dr. Joe Medicine Crow

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.

Muhammad Yunus

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.

Billie Jean King

8/12/09

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

Romain Gary

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!

Earl Felton

8/10/09

Though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment.

Sir Roger Fenwick

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.

Josh Bazell

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.

Groucho Marx

8/7/09

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Groucho Marx

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.

Josh Bazell

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.

Josh Bazell

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.

Leo Tolstoy

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.

Jack London

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.

H.P. Lovecraft

8/1/09

As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future.

Alison Lurie

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.”

John Kennedy Toole

7/30/09

Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.

Diablo Cody

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.

Jean Kerr

7/28/09

The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with baited breath.

W.C. Fields

7/27/09

If you drink don't drive. Don't even putt.

Dean Martin

7/26/09

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

Hunter S Thompson

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.

Hunter S Thompson

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.

Hunter S Thompson

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.

Ted Rall

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.

Joseph L Mankiewicz

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.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.

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.

Lawrence Block

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.

Lawrence Block

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.

Lawrence Block