QuoteLog

“There will be days when working on your project will be as appealing as curdled milk. Nothing I can think of short of childbirth (for which I often thank the gender-gods I won’t experience first hand) puts an individual through so much pain for so great a reward. It’s like eating chocolate-covered broken glass.”

“The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.”

“Ted needs someone to be there 100% of the time. He thinks that’s love. It’s not love - it’s babysitting.”

“We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.”

“You know, my theory is that anybody who has it completely together in times like these is either stupid, crazy, or evil.”

“Freelancers live in a land of Kafka and secret societies: blackballed without knowing why; email and phone calls not answered; no trial and no appeal.”

“You know, I think Hollywood celebrities have a big role to play. For example, on the environment, not too many people realize this, but Hollywood celebrities make up just .00000000001 percent of the world’s population ... and yet consume nearly 36 percent of its resources. Seventeen acres of rain forest are consumed every day by Barbra Streisand alone.”

“Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog’s face he gets mad at you? But when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window.”

“Work, work, work for all these years, and what is my reward? Calculated insults. Stinging slaps in the face. While I continue to struggle to earn a living in my declining years, churning out weekly columns for a pittance, teenage pop thingee Britney Spears, threatening to write a first novel, with a little help from her mummy, has pre-sold her scribble for a 500,000 pounds sterling publisher’s advance in the U.K. and a reported cool million U.S. from Random House in New York. To be fair, my only protruding curve is my belly, and for all I know we are on the verge of witnessing the debut of a second Jane Austen.”

“People who are offended by shows that feature contestants vying for money and air time in bug-eating competitions, relationship tests and interpersonal warfare are already counting on a time-honored television tradition to deliver them from what they believe is a noxious plague: the propensity of network programmers to take every original idea and beat it quickly and thoroughly to death.”

“If my husband ever met a woman on the street who looked like one of his paintings, he would faint.”

“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.”

“We are a nation of business people, and we find art and artists threatening. We will take artists’ concerns seriously only if they don’t cut significantly into the profit of some industry.”

“We are growing further and further away from a society in which making art is a common practice, and this seems to deepen the hold of cliches on our thinking. Proper ladies don’t necessarily have to know how to play the harpsichord; gentlemen don’t toss off sonnets to seal the romantic deal. As we become a society of art consumers, with little real experience with the technical issues of making art, we have less and less of substance to say about it.”

“Simplicity for its own sake is not a design solution.”

“Don’t mind me, pulling my hair out because of the squandered potential of the web is a hobby of mine.”

“Rightly or wrongly, the free and open software movements have gained a reputation for militant opposition to the very idea of intellectual property. The result is that our voice is deemed to be so loud that it cannot be heard over its own noise. We are in many respects ignored, when we have in fact useful things to say and might be heard if only we dropped some of the Maoist fervency.”

“A work grows as it will and sometimes confronts its author as an independent, even an alien, creation.”

“It is a good thing to follow the First Law of Holes; if you are in one, stop digging.”

“The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”

“I will point out that Chelsea Clinton, in the eight years her father was president, didn’t get arrested once. The problem with Jenna is that it’s been twice in four months. A third time -- it’s three strikes and you’re out in Texas -- and they’ll have to execute her.”

“Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionaries.”

“The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it - so fine that we often are on the line and do not know it.”

“If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?”

“What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you’ve made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.”

“Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.”

“The truth is that PowerPoint is what makes the war run. Memos are all done in Word but wars are planned and briefed in Powerpoint.”

“If I wanted smoke blown up my ass, I’d be at home with a pack of Camels and a short length of rubber hose.”