If last words are to be audible and coherent, they need to be delivered before you have any tubes up your nose or down your throat. Otherwise, the nurse gets the last word when she says, 'Don't try to talk, honey.'
— Florence King
We are incapable of leaving anything to the imagination and loath to leave anything out. Maniacal thoroughness has become our national verbal ideal.
To me, the thing that has always ruined Jane Fonda is her voice.
I've done pretty well as a professional fed-up. The tools of my trade so far have been irony, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and supercilious contempt, but these are highly civilized weapons designed for 18th-century French salons.
I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.
Christopher Hitchens and I were not friends or even acquaintances. We never met or spoke on the phone, just exchanged occasional brief letters - notes, really - hand-written and snail-mailed at first, e-mailed later.
Until the mid-seventies, the traditional or classic lesbian was always a spinster and often a tweedy intellectual, with a stark glamour that titillated men and women alike. This is the woman that feminists destroyed when they pressured the media for 'positive images' of lesbians.
Any woman who has ever worked in a gutsy male environment knows that the correct response to a randy remark is an even more salacious retort. But timid feminists don't see it that way. To them, the proper reply is a lawsuit - that safe, modern version of the old slap in the face.
Whenever people are confronted by a prediction for the future that they simply cannot or will not believe, they always say, 'It will never happen in my lifetime.' If the prediction is something they deplore and fear, they say it with calculated bravado, often adding a smug, snorty hhrrummph.
Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
Some last words seem flat-out unbelievable.
Democracy elevates by turning ordinary people into extraordinary ordinary people called celebrities.
In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.
Optimists don't mind if you eavesdrop on them. They welcome it, in fact, because it helps them spread their fiendish gospel.
They don't call him 'No Drama Obama' for nothing. He's even worse than we thought because he has committed the ultimate American crime, worse than anything he has been accused of so far: He has no sense of humor.
You can't pretend to be witty because wit is dry, subtle, lacerating, cynical, elitist, and risque - all impossible to fake. Humor, on the other hand, is broad, soothing, positive, inclusive, and smutty - to make sure everybody gets it. Pretending to be humorous is easy, and a great many people are doing it.
Feminists, I hasten to add, are not all bad. In fact, they are an ideal bellwether, an invaluable aid in helping me form opinions on issues that I don't have time to keep up with. If the feminists are for it, I'm against it; if the feminists are against it, I'm for it.
Until feminists started wailing about the female's passivity, submissiveness, and something called 'victim status,' I had no idea women were such doormats. My childhood was populated by Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Marie Curie, Clare Boothe Luce, and the Duchess of Windsor.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.
American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
If the West Point class of 1915 is called 'the class the stars fell on' for the number of World War II generals it produced, my junior-high class of 1950 is the class a ton of bricks fell on from Hollywood's gut-wrenching portrayals of mother-love in '40s-era movies.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
Let's face it: 'Threatening' people are the only interesting people around. The unthreatening are, by and large, competent mediocrities who take lemming-like aim at careers in television.
I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.
In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' I couldn't take my eyes off Judith Anderson as Big Mama.
Aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals and, on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don't cross.
Women's writing was coming along fine until feminists came along and turned it into Women's Lit.
A man should never apologize!
Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.
