I hope this pen works. Yes, it does.

—Katherine Mansfield, diary

How’re you doing, apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy?

—Ali Smith, Spring

A friend of mine says this is the beginning of the end of the global order.

—Rachel Cusk, Coventry

One day someone will use the last surviving Latin word in English to say something like, This sucks.

—Michael Hofmann, Paris Review interview

I’ve heard the saying “That sucks” for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

—Stephen King, The Stand

I wonder what the nice people are doing tonight.

—Chelsey Minnis, “Iceberg”

Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.

—Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.

—Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

—They’ve got crabs.

—What’s wrong with that? I asked. We eat crabs all the time.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People

Here we go then, (genital) warts an’ all …

—Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

Everything that is true is inappropriate.

—Oscar Wilde

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

—Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

Let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood.

—A. R. Ammons, “Sphere: The Form of a Motion”

Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.

—Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

—He licked his lips. Well, if you want my opinion—

—I don’t, she said. I have my own.

—Toni Morrison, Beloved

Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.

—Robert Graves, Paris Review interview

See the moon? It hates us.

—Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

The moon, big as a Bitcoin.

—Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein

Supposing one fell onto the moon.

—D. H. Lawrence, “Indians and an Englishman”

Moon’s left town. Moon’s clean gone.

—James Michie, “Arizona Nature Myth”

You know where the Beatles got that shit from. You know that’s our shit they fucking up like that.

—Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

How come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape—because they’re white?

—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South, we’re touchers.

—Charlie Rose, attributed

Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.

—Robert Christgau, in The Village Voice

—How’s everything with you?

—Absolutely marvelous!

—Shit.

—Bernard Malamud and Brendan Gill, in conversation

Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.

—Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

—Dorothy Parker, attributed

Tweedy shitballs.

—Calvin Trillin’s term for boarding-school types, Remembering Denny

I’ll have no college swankies.

—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Oh, fuck, not another elf!

—Hugo Dyson, as J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud an early draft of The Lord of the Rings

I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.

—Shaun Bythell, Diary of a Bookseller

I couldn’t give a damn who found the rabbit’s foot or the magic mug.

—David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper

I place a total embargo on dragons.

—Clive James, Play All

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

—Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Shit, I said to myself, if I stop now, I’m liable to wind up with a fucking picket fence.

—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

—Anne Sexton, Paris Review interview


Copyright © 2020 by Dwight Garner