INDEX TO QUOTES, BOTH FAMOUS AND UNKNOWN, THAT
HAVE APPEARED IN THE
BIRMINGHAM ARTS JOURNAL
. . .selected by Jim Reed with contributions from
Kathy Jolley, Liz Reed & Irene Latham * * *
“Tact consists of knowing how far we may go too far.”
--Jean Cocteau
“There is no harm in charging oneself up with
delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”
--Steve Martin
“It is one of our jobs, as journalists, to be
hated. But it is not enough to be merely hated.
It is also important to be hated for the right reasons.”
--Gerald Hannon
“Shall I tell you what true knowledge is?
When you know, to know that you know, and when
you do not know, to know that you do not know—that
is true knowledge.”
--Confucius
“I notice that in spite of the frightful lies you
have printed about me, I still believe everything
you say about other people.”
--Robert Maynard Hutchins
“A word is the taste our tongue has of eternity;
that’s why I speak.”
--Rosario Castellanos
“We are tolerant enough of those who do not agree
with us, provided only they are sufficiently miserable.”
--David Grayson
“Two wrongs make a casserole.”
--Bunny Hoest & John Reiner
“The only thing better than singing is more singing.”
--Ella Fitzgerald
“The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space
between people who are trying their best to understand
each other is hallowed ground.”
--Fred Rogers
“Write only if you cannot live without writing.
Write only what you alone can write.”
--Elie Wiesel
“Silence the artist and you have silenced the most
articulate voice the people have.”
--Katharine Hepburn
“From the solemn gloom of the templechilden run out
to sit in the dust,
God watches them play andforgets the priest.”
--Rabindranath Tagore
“Just how much does succotash suffer?”
--Jim Reed
“It is not by wearing down into uniformity all
that is individual in themselves, but by
cultivating it and calling it forth, within the
limits imposed by the rights and interests
of others, that human beings become a noble and
beautiful object of contemplation.”
--John Stuart Mill
“Where words fail, music speaks.”
--Hans Christian Andersen
“Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist should
have his head examined.”
--Robert Bloch
“Of late, I have no friends; I must be doing
something right.”
--Somerset Maugham
“Majorities, of course, are often mistaken.
This is why the silencing of minorities is always
dangerous.”
--Alan Barth
“A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.”
--Steven Wright
“The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art –
because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over
what I’ve done—is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.”
--Kurt Vonnegut
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those
little bits of good put
together than overwhelm the world.”
--Desmond Tutu
“Part of the pleasure of being alive is the knowledge
that you’re not dead yet.”
--George Carlin
“To travel is to take a journey into yourself.”
--Danny Kaye
"Words themselves become beings, sentences become...
natural vegetation to be guided by the gardener's hands."
--Eric Sevareid
"I got an hourglass figure, but it’s later than you think."
--Minnie Pearl
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to
add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
--Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a
nymphomaniac. It’s great for the first two weeks."
--Lewis Grizzard
"If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live,
I’d type a little faster."
--Isaac Asimov
"Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples
of what we might have
been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us."
--George Carlin
"How vain painting is--we admire the realistic depiction of
objects which in their
original state we don’t admire at all."
--Blaise Pascal
"The surest way to wake up and smell the roses every day is to
go to sleep face down in the flower bed."
--Argus Hamilton
"How many ne’er set foot beyond themselves!"
--Omar Khayyam
“We have no art. Everything we do is art.”
--Balinese saying
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade,
just as painting does, or music.
If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. T
hen rearrange the rules
to suit yourself."
--Truman Capote
"History...is nothing other than a collection of the
lives of people, some of them great, some of them
ordinary...nothing other than a collection of what
people have done in challenging circumstances and
how they have risen to those circumstances."
--Artur Davis
“Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a
rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
--Don Marquis
"The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of
man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help
him endure and prevail."
--William Faulkner
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because
those who mind don't matter and those who matter
don't mind."
--Dr. Seuss
"Live one day at a time, unless you can figure
out how to live two."
--Dik Browne
"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say
don't listen to writers talking
about writing or themselves."
--Lillian Hellman
"It is no longer a question of where civilization began,
but if it ever did!"
--Alfred E. Neuman
"I take exception to your 'time travel is possible'
statement, as I have only been able to go five minutes
back into the past AT MOST, and since Jane Seymour was not
there, it hardly seemed worth it."
--Chris McCaleb
"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words--the words live on for as long as
there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It
is not really a bad deal, all things considered."
--J. Michael Straczynski
"I'm an optimal behaviorist, which means behaving to the top of my genetics every day.
After a few hundred days of optimal behavior, optimal striving at the top of my genes
and chromosomes, you can't help but FEEL optimistic!"
--Ray Bradbury, in a letter to Jim Reed
"Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can.
If you can't, you're a writer."
--Charles Ghigna
"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love,
and love what you write.
The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write
something you love, something to live for."
--Ray Bradbury
"What if you view a work of art as carefully as you read a book?
What if you glance quickly through the pages of a book as quickly
as you view a work of art?"
--Jim Reed
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
--Juan Ramon Jimenez
“Enough is enough, and too much is plenty.”
--Bugs Bunny
"The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is."
--Igor Stravinsky
“Sharon Stone has the kind of face I’d leave my wife for.
Since I’m not married, I’ll have to leave someone else’s wife.”
--Buck Henry
"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one:
that there is a part of the mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless
is expert on what is beautiful?"
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
"Nothing happens unless first a dream."
--Carl Sandburg
"Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play."
--Albert Einstein
"When I consider the gizzard of a cockroach, how wonderfully it is made, something
of the immensity and imagination of the universe bursts in upon me with startling clarity.
But to consider the gizzard alone is to be partial and in the interest of science I must
avoid that at all costs."
--Otis Calloway
"You can taste a word."
--Pearl Bailey
"What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?"
--Mike Peters
"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact
with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country
where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal."
--George Bernard Shaw
“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine. I have
been eating poetry.”
--Mark Strand
"He who speaks the truth should have one foot in the stirrup."
--Hindu proverb
"Copy editors don't object to being called anal retentive, they just debate whether the
term should be hyphenated."
--Alex MacLeod
"How truly wise, perhaps, it was my dollars were so few, for if my purse were full, then
I would never know if you had married me for riches, or because my eyes were blue!"
--Louise Shaw
"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed."
--Christopher Morley
"I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it.
The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into
a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to
end in mystery."
--Billy Collins
"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could
make a wonderful living."
--Yiddish proverb
“Life is easier to take than you’d think; all that is necessary is to accept
the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.”
--Kathleen Norris
"Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again."
--Goethe
“The profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion.
When it has once entered peoples heads it never leaves them.”
--George Sand
"Agriculture is a very fine thing, because you get such an unmistakable answer as
to whether you're making a fool of yourself or hitting the mark."
--Goethe
"Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair--it only weighs me down.
My eyes--I only see with them. My lips--they only help me to speak.
Of what use is it to be beautiful?"
--Karel Capek (spoken by the robot Helena in "R.U.R.")
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
--H. G. Wells
"Women aren't as mere as they used to be."
--Walt Kelly
"The past is close kin to pain, and it is near to happiness."
--Howell Vines
"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings,
but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries
escape them, they sound like beautiful music."
--Soren Kierkegaard
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you.
And then you win."
--Mahatma Gandhi
"Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might
have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us."
--George Carlin
"Beauty is in the heart of the beholder."
--H. G. Wells
"Plagiarists have, at least, the merit of preservation."
--Benjamin Disraeli
"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the
canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you
remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible."
--Elie Wiesel
"The right to be heard does not automatically include
the right to be taken seriously."
--Hubert H. Humphrey
“Brief let me be. The fewer words the better prayer.”
--Martin Luther
"Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your
neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are
going to throw it away. Try writing utterly
unplanned stories and see what comes out."
--Brenda Ueland
"If you took all the dill pickles eaten in American in one
month and laid them end to end...people would think you were some kind of nut."
--Homer and Jethro
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
--T. H. Huxley
"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.'"
--Eleanor Roosevelt
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality
through not dying."
--Woody Allen
"Rules are for established things, like the pieces and positions of a game.
Men and women are not established things; they're experiments, all of them."
--H. G. Wells
"Laughter is the outward expression of a nerve well-struck."
--Larry Gelbart
"If the Good Lord had wanted us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates."
--Roald Dahl (spoken by Willie Wonka)
"There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are nothing,
the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder."
"Though people call me lewd continually, I'm guiltless, 'tis their fancies fixed on me."
--Omar Khayyam
"Triority: Three things that need to be done first."
--Rich Hall
"If you could say it, there'd be no reason to paint."
--Edward Hopper
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later."
--Miles Davis
"Reincarnation could explain why bad things happen to good people and why good things
happen to bad people. But since bad things also happen to bad people and good things
also happen to good people, one might well suppose that there is no rhyme or reason
why anything happens to anybody."
--Robert Todd Carroll
"Treat the world well...It was not given to you by your parents...It was lent to you
by your children."
--Kenyan proverb
"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."
--Groucho Marx
"The dead stay where we leave them. I suppose that is the real good in death, that they
do stay; that it makes them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can
never spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again."
--H. G. Wells
"Art hath an enemy called ignorance."
--Ben Jonson
"To give birth to a desire, to nourish it, to develop it, to increase it, to irritate it,
to satisfy it; this is a whole poem."
--Balzac
"What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money."
--Henny Youngman
"The first important financial advance for newspapers came in 1451
when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made it
possible for a newspaper to cheaply and accurately reproduce every
single error thousands of times."
--Dave Barry
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