Jottings from the notebook

FRIEND IN HER MID-30'S: So how old are you again?
ME: I'm at that in-between age--biologically old enough to be your father, and emotionally young enough to be your child.

Frank Sinatra actually saved a man’s life once.  He just said three words.  “Boys, that’s enough.”

“What’s it like outside?”

“Cold and depressing, like my ex-husband.”

The bosses are happy when YOU feel helpless.  They’re pleased when they think the source of your trouble is your family . . . they even like addicts as long as they’re mostly out of sight.  After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

                -- Charles Baxter

Who HASN’T gotten hurt?  If you get to a certain age and you’ve never been hurt, then that means you were the asshole.

Justice is incidental to Law and Order

                -- J Edgar Hoover

I’m talking to you pre-coffee?  I don’t know whether to be honored or terrified.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.                       

                -- Steven Weinberg

The Roman Catholic Church is like a school where the best students are always expelled.

                -- Paul Valery

Scottish men: they’re so sexy they put the laid in plaid.

“Are you having a good time?”

“I’m surrounded by horny, stupid men.”

“Isn’t that great? You can get laid and reinforce your self-esteem at the same time.”

                -- Mike Carey, Lucifer

Love is a weird mix of nervousness and serenity—like an ache mixed with a hug.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

                -- Jean Giradoux 

A woman has her first child the moment she says “I do.”

Winning is the mark of Abel.

                -- Diane Arbus

Closeness gives birth to distance every time.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever felt responsible.

                -- Stanislaw Lec

Guys are like refrigerators. You keep going back to the ones that are half-empty, hoping this time it’ll be there, that thing that you want.

I’d rather be whole than good.

                -- Carl Jung

If you want to bet on who will do the dumbest thing in the world, pick the smartest guy in the room.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.

                -- Arthur Miller

Never forget that, if you want to forgive your enemies, first you have to make them.

Once we were citizens. Then we were consumers. Now we're just data.

                -- Art Yomama 

He’s the kind of writer who does to his women what Nabokov did to his butterflies.

Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

                -- Schubert

The future is going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul.

                -- JG Ballard, 1982 

REPORTER: Did you ever sleep with General Eisenhower?

MARLENE DIETRICH: How could I, darling? He was never at the front.

Marriage is all about learning how to live with someone you used to think you could never live without.

Sacrifice is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.

                 -- Kate Atkinson, A God In Ruins

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

                -- HG Wells

If I were you, we'd both be miserable.

STUDIO HEAD: We want you to rewrite and direct Cleopatra. Name your price.

NUNNALLY JOHNSON: Ten percent of the losses.

I have a cobweb soul; it feels everything.

He used to be a great artist, but now he’s only a genius.

                -- Braque on Picasso

You must come again when you have less time.

                -- Walter Sickert showing Denton Welch the door

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.

                -- John Kenneth Galbraith

The only perfect lovers are the ones who got away.

A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.”

                -- Stories of Mr Keuner, Bertolt Brecht
 

The heart has no sex.

                   -- Art Yomama