QUOTES, BOTH FAMOUS AND UNKNOWN, THAT HAVE APPEARED IN THE 
BIRMINGHAM ARTS JOURNAL
  
- selected by Jim Reed with contributions from Kathy Jolley, Liz Reed & Irene Latham

* * *

"Some people say the garbage is half full. Some say it's half empty. 
I say it's completely empty."
--Grimmy  (Mother Goose & Grimm comic strip, after Grimmy has 
turned garbage can over)
 
"A human is both a mystery looking for a mind and a mind looking 
for a mystery."
--Joel Fry
 
"They understand but little who understand only what can be 
explained."
--Marie Ebner Eschenbach
 
 
"While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, 
I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure 
of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any 
rate  you will have been cheerful."
--H.G. Wells
 
 
"Well, I object to all this sex on the Television. I mean I keep falling 
off.”
--Graham Chapman (Monty Python)
 
 “If you can tickle yourself, you can laugh when you please.”
--Russian proverb
 
 “Anyone who says money can’t buy happiness doesn’t know where to shop.”
--Eunice Wentworth “Lovey” Howell
 
 “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.”
--Ted Williams
 
 “I listen to the voices.”
--William Faulkner
 
 “If a word were misspelled in the dictionary, how would we know?”
--Ziggy
 
 “Tomorrow is the day after the first day of the rest of your life.”
--Jim Reed
 
 "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."
--Lily Tomlin 
 
"There is no greater illusion than that age brings a simplification of life. On the contrary, it accumulates obligations."
--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 
 
"Those who take time to explain their creative work are not busy doing their creative work."
--Jim Reed 
 
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
 
“It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the 
twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”
--H. G. Wells 
 
“Now I rewrite more and more severely, and I take great pleasure in cutting thousands of words out of first drafts; 
I think that’s a pleasure worth learning as early as possible in one’s career, not least because realizing that one can do 
it helps one relax into writing the first draft in which it’s better to have too much material for later shaping than not enough.”
--Ramsey Campbell 
 
“The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are right.” 
--Mark Twain 
 
“The most identifiable trait of Anglo-Saxons is that we always mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.” 
--Argus Hamilton 
 
“Dreams, books, are each a world.” 
--Wordsworth 
 
“Too low they build who build beneath the stars.” 
--Edward Young 
 
“Comedy is in my blood. Too bad it’s not in my act.” 
--Rodney Dangerfield 
 
“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.” 
--Antonio Porchia 
 
“Silences make the real conversation between friends. Not the saying, but never needing to say is what counts.” 
--Margaret Lee Runbeck 
 
“Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.”
 --Oscar Levant 
 
“I remember things the way they should have been.” 
--Truman Capote
 
“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead 
that wears you out—it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.” 
–Robert Service
 
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” 
–Mark Twain
 
“We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages—stand quietly before them and 
wait till they speak to us.” 
–Arthur Schopenhauer
 
“When a man comes to me, I accept him at his best, not at his worst. Why make so much ado? When a man washes his hands 
before paying a visit, and you receive him in that 
clean state, you do not thereby stand surety for his always having been clean in the past.” 
–Confucius
 
“As soon as you feel too old to do a thing, do it.”
--Margaret Deland
 
“Imitation is the sincerest form of insult.” 
--Elbert Hubbard
 
"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending  existence to nothing."
--Edmond Burke
 
“A poet more than 30 years old is simply an overgrown child.”
--H.L. Mencken
 
“Old men love to give good advice; it consoles them for being  able no longer to set a bad example.”
--Rochefoucald
 
“If you cannot find a companion equal to or better than  yourself, journey alone. Do not travel with a fool.”
--Buddha (Dhammapada)
 
"Tact consists of knowing how far we may go too far."
--Jean Cocteau
 
“The past is not dead. It isn’t even past!”
--William Faulkner
 
"There is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions   between moments of valid inspiration."
--Steve Martin
 
“We have learned the answers, all the answers: It is the  question that we do not know.”
--Archibald MacLeish 
 
"It is one of our jobs, as journalists, to be hated. But it is  not enough to be merely hated. It is also important 
to be  hated for the right reasons."
--Gerald Hannon
 
“If one tells the truth, one is sure sooner or later to be found out.”
--Oscar Wilde
 
"Shall I tell you what true knowledge is? When you know, to know that you know, and when you do not know, to know that 
you do not know­--that is true knowledge."
--Confucius
 
“It’s the good girls who keep the diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”
--Tallulah Bankhead
 
"I notice that in spite of the frightful lies you have printed about me, I still believe everything you say 
about other people." 
--Robert Maynard Hutchins
 
"A word is the taste our tongue has of eternity; that’s why I speak."
--Rosario Castellanos
 
“I just put my feet in the air and move them around.”
--Fred Astaire
 
"We are tolerant enough of those who do not agree with us, provided only they are sufficiently miserable."
--David Grayson
 
"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
--T.S. Eliot
 
"To write a love letter we must begin without knowing what we intend to say, and end without knowing what we 
  have written."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
 
"Two wrongs make a casserole."
--Bunny Hoest & John Reiner
 
“Each one sees what he carries in his heart.”
--Goethe
 
"The only thing better than singing is more singing."
--Ella Fitzgerald
 
"Art…is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned."
--Ernest Hello
 
“If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
--Voltaire
 
"The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand 
  each other is hallowed ground."
--Fred Rogers
 
“Money may buy the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite, medicine but not 
 health, acquaintances but not friends, servants but not faithfulness, days of joy but not peace or happiness.”
--Henrik Ibsen 
 
“There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.”
--Robert Graves
 
"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."
--Elie Wiesel
 
“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
--Mae West
 
"Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have."
--Katharine Hepburn
 
"From the solemn gloom of the temple children run out to sit in the dust, God watches them play and forgets the 
  priest."
--Rabindranath Tagore
 
"Just how much does succotash suffer?"
--Jim Reed
 
"What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world."
--Albert Einstein
 
“Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: ‘What is it good for?’ a 
  question which would abolish the rose, and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage.”
--James Russell Lowell
 
"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it 
  forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and 
  beautiful object of contemplation."
--John Stuart Mill
 
"Where words fail, music speaks."
--Hans Christian Andersen
“I grant your point, but not because I agree with you. I’m under sedation.”
--Charles Saxon
 
"Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined."
--Robert Bloch
 
"Of late, I have no friends; I must be doing something right."
--Somerset Maugham
 
“It’s really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or 
  what your audience needs.”
--Erica Jong
 
"Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is always dangerous."
--Alan Barth
 
"We are all here for a spell; get all the good laughs you can."
--Will Rogers
 
"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking."
--Steven Wright
 
"The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art–because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over   
  what I’ve done—is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae."
--Kurt Vonnegut
 
"Would that we could at once paint with the eyes!­ In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how  
  much is lost!"
--Gotthold Lessing
 
"Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world."
--Desmond Tutu
 
"Part of the pleasure of being alive is the knowledge that you’re not dead yet."
--George Carlin
 
"To travel is to take a journey into yourself."
--Danny Kaye
 
"Words themselves become beings, sentences become...natural vegetation to be guided by the gardener's hands." 
--Eric Sevareid 
 
"I got an hourglass figure, but it’s later than you think." 
--Minnie Pearl 
 
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
--Antoine de Saint Exupery
 
"Being a newspaper columnist is like being married to a nymphomaniac. It’s great for the first two weeks."
--Lewis Grizzard 
 
"If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster."
--Isaac Asimov
 
"Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and 
  traders gotten hold of us." 
--George Carlin 
 
"How vain painting is--we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don’t admire at all." 
--Blaise Pascal 
 
"The surest way to wake up and smell the roses every day is to go to sleep face down in the flower bed." 
--Argus Hamilton 
 
"All bad art is the result of good intentions.”
--Oscar Wilde
 
"How many ne’er set foot beyond themselves!" 
--Omar Khayyam 
 
"We have no art. Everything we do is art."
--Balinese saying
 
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house 
  or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul 
  has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It 
  doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it 
  into something that’s like you after you take your hand away.”
--Ray Bradbury
 
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
--Samuel Butler 
 
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, 
  fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." 
--Truman Capote 
 
"History...is nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them 
  ordinary...nothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have
  risen to those circumstances." 
--Artur Davis 
 
"You will find poetry nowhere, unless you bring some with you."
--Joseph Joubert
 
"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
--Don Marquis
 
"The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and 
  prevail." 
--William Faulkner 
 
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." 
--Dr. Seuss 
 
"Live one day at a time, unless you can figure out how to live two." 
--Dik Browne 
 
"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves." 
--Lillian Hellman 
 
"It is no longer a question of where civilization began, but if it ever did!" 
--Alfred E. Neuman 
 
"I take exception to your 'time travel is possible' statement, as I have only been able to go five minutes back into the 
  past AT MOST, and since Jane Seymour was not there, it hardly seemed worth it." 
--Chris McCaleb 
 
“At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.”
--William Safire
 
“When you see a good man, think of emulating him; when you see a bad man, examine your own heart.”
--Confucius
 
"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words--the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, 
  audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered." 
--J. Michael Straczynski 
 
"A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be."
--Robert Quillen
 
"I'm an optimal behaviorist, which means behaving to the top of my genetics every day. After a few hundred days of 
  optimal behavior, optimal striving at the top of my genes and chromosomes, you can't help but FEEL optimistic!" 
--Ray Bradbury, in a letter to Jim Reed 
 
“I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come.”
--Hugh Molson
 
"Get yourself a notebook and write in it EVERY night for two weeks. Then stop if you can. If you can't, you're a 
  writer." 
--Charles Ghigna 
 
"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have 
  to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for." 
--Ray Bradbury 
 
"What if you view a work of art as carefully as you read a book? What if you glance quickly through the pages of a 
  book as quickly as you view a work of art?" 
--Jim Reed 
 
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 
"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than 
  to have answers which might be wrong."
--Richard Feynman
 
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." 
--Juan Ramon Jimenez 
 
"Enough is enough, and too much is plenty."
--Bugs Bunny
 
"The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is." 
--Igor Stravinsky 
 
"Sharon Stone has the kind of face I’d leave my wife for. Since I’m not married, I’ll have to leave someone else’s 
  wife."
--Buck Henry
 
"Has any psychological experiment yielded a more delightful suggestion than this one: that there is a part of the 
  mind without ambition or information, which nonetheless is expert on what is beautiful?" 
--Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 
 
"Nothing happens unless first a dream." 
--Carl Sandburg 
 
"Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play." 
--Albert Einstein 
 
"When I consider the gizzard of a cockroach, how wonderfully it is made, something of the immensity and 
  imagination of the universe bursts in upon me with startling clarity. But to consider the gizzard alone is to be partial 
  and in the interest of science I must avoid that at all costs." 
--Otis Calloway 
 
"You can taste a word." 
--Pearl Bailey 
 
"What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?" 
--Mike Peters 
 
"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get 
  something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not 
  unreal." 
--George Bernard Shaw 
 
"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
  There is no happiness like mine. I have 
  been eating poetry."
--Mark Strand
 
"He who speaks the truth should have one foot in the stirrup." 
--Hindu proverb 
 
"Copy editors don't object to being called anal retentive, they just debate whether the term should be hyphenated." 
--Alex MacLeod 
 
"How truly wise, perhaps, it was my dollars were so few, for if my purse were full, then I would never know if you 
  had married me for riches, or because my eyes were blue!" 
--Louise Shaw 
 
"My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed." 
--Christopher Morley 
 
"I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself 
  to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in 
  clarity and to end in mystery." 
--Billy Collins 
 
"If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living." 
--Yiddish proverb 
 
"Life is easier to take than you’d think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, 
  and bear the intolerable."
--Kathleen Norris
 
"Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again." 
--Goethe 
 
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
--Ray Bradbury
 
"The profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion. When it has once entered people’s 
  heads it never leaves them."
--George Sand
 
"No two identical parts are alike."
--Beach’s Law
 
"Agriculture is a very fine thing, because you get such an unmistakable answer as to whether you're making a fool of 
  yourself or hitting the mark." 
--Goethe 
 
"Am I beautiful? I think it must be the rose. My hair--it only weighs me down. My eyes--I only see with them. My 
  lips--they only help me to speak. Of what use is it to be beautiful?" 
--Karel Capek (spoken by the robot Helena in "R.U.R.") 
 
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." 
--H. G. Wells 
 
"Women aren't as mere as they used to be." 
--Walt Kelly 
 
“Comedy is tragedy revisited.”
--Phyllis Diller
 
"The past is close kin to pain, and it is near to happiness." 
--Howell Vines 
 
"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that 
  when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music." 
--Soren Kierkegaard 
 
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. And then you win." 
--Mahatma Gandhi 
 
"Beauty is in the heart of the beholder." 
--H. G. Wells 
 
"Plagiarists have, at least, the merit of preservation." 
--Benjamin Disraeli 
 
"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is 
  more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible." 
--Elie Wiesel 
 
"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." 
--Hubert H. Humphrey 
 
"Brief let me be. The fewer words the better prayer."
--Martin Luther
 
"Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. 
  Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out." 
--Brenda Ueland 
 
"If you took all the dill pickles eaten in American in one month and laid them end to end...people would think you 
  were some kind of nut." 
--Homer and Jethro 
 
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever 
  and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." 
--T. H. Huxley 
  
"What Carl Sagan envisioned we could become: Conscious, wise, compassionate, energetically curious, 
eternally skeptical, immune to the manipulations and intimidations of the powerful, free of the walls that 
imprison and divide us; awe-inspired by the beauty of an ever-broadening identification horizon, welcoming 
of its expansion; no longer stunted by the old primate hierarchies, but instead, proud of our capacity to care 
for each other and to discern our tiny, utterly decentralized place in the fabric of nature, space and time; 
secure enough at last to embrace the wonder inherent in this reality, awakened to our responsibilities as 
a link in the generations past and future, at peace with our self-knowledge, alert to a heightened and consequential 
sense of the sacred; long-term thinkers, solid citizens of the planet and the cosmos; as Carl was; fully alive, completely connected."
--Ann Druyan
 
“It is useless to send armies against ideas.”
--Georg Brandes
 
"I might as well be myself. Everyone else is taken."
--Oliver Stone
 
"The art of a thing is, first, its aim, and next, its manner of accomplishment."
-C.N. Bovee
  
"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence
that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time."
--Thomas Carlyle
 
"Ambiguity is invariant."
--Hartz's Uncertainty Principle
 
"Society is now one polished horde,Form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored."
--Lord Byron
 
"It is not too much to ask of Americans that they not be censors, that they run the risk of being deeply wounded by ideas
 so that we may all be free. If we are wounded by an ugly idea, we must count it as part of the cost of freedom and, like 
 American heroes in days gone by, bravely carry on."
--Kurt Vonnegut