Books |
Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany
Dwight Garner
By
Published: Feb 16, 2021
Category:
Non Fiction
One of the perks of editing this site is the friends you make. At some point in our middle-middle age, I made the acquaintance of Bill Novak, the most distinguished ghost since Caspar — he wrote or coauthored some two dozen books, including the bestselling memoirs of Lee Iacocca, Tip O’Neill, Nancy Reagan, the Mayflower Madam, Oliver North, and Magic Johnson. He now amuses himself with why-didn’t-I-think-of-that anthologies: The Big Book of Jewish Humor and Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks. As ghosts will, we swap stories about our collaborations and dash off the occasional email with some can-you-believe-this link. And Bill sends occasional mails of jokes, which is convenient for me, as a recent collection included this one — “Two Jews are walking in a dangerous neighborhood, and they’re being followed by two men. One says, “Let’s get out of here. There are two of them and we’re alone.” — which you will encounter again in my new novel.
Recently Bill gathered some of the greatest hits from Dwight Garner’s anthology of quotations, which he has, if you will, garnered from forty years of reading. If you read The New York Times, you know that he’s the chief book reviewer. Even more, he’s got the killer gift: he can write a sentence that you write down for later use. On Mike Nichols: “He could place a well-buffed fingernail on a tick that wanted to be a tock.” On Super Bowl poet, Amanda Gorman: “With her canary-yellow Prada coat, her regal red headband, her thrice-scrubbed innocence and her exacting delivery, she was a one-person reminder that if winter is here, then spring cannot be far behind.” On Lucien Freud: “He had a mean word for everyone. He put the knife in white and it came out red.”
Bill Novak did me the favor of sending along his favorites from “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany,” which you’ll find below. Garner didn’t say “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” — that was T.S. Eliot — but on that theory, mature readers will buy this book and sound smart for the rest of their lives. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd.
— Tom Lehrer, “Smut”
Goodbye, and I don’t mean au revoir.
— Christopher Ricks
And off he fucked.
— Kingsley Amis (attributed), after having told someone to fuck off.
Neither am I.
— Peter Cook, responding to the boast, “I’m writing a novel.”
Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.
— Ryan Scott on Twitter
Whatever is the plural of Applebee’s?
— Roy Blunt Jr.
Dear editor: It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments write them on the back of a check.
— Erle Stanley Gardner (attributed)
My dad was the town drunk. Usually that’s not so bad, but New York City?
— Henny Youngman
Go — and never darken my towels again.
— Groucho Marx, in “Duck Soup”
Your back is my favorite part of you
the part furthest away from your mouth.
— Louise Glück, “Purple Bathing Suit”
I used to not be able to work if there were dishes in the sink. Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink.
— Anne Lamott
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
— W. H. Auden
No wine she said. It leads to cheese.
— Lorrie Moore
I think women admire Marlene Dietrich so much because she looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast.
— Angela Carter
Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?
No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.
— Art Spiegelman, interview about “Maus”
He had never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary.
— William Faulkner, on Ernest Hemingway
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
— Ernest Hemingway, on William Faulkner
Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.
— Ben Lerner
It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.
— Dorothy Parker
That was some weird shit.
— George W. Bush, on Donald Trump’s inauguration speech
Substitute “damn” every time you’re tempted to write “very.” Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
— Mark Twain
