Читать книгу Wild Words from Wild Women - Autumn Stephens - Страница 6

I'm tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

I can throw a fit, I'm a master at it.

—Madonna, chameleonesque queen of chutzpah.

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

Success didn't spoil me; I've always been insufferable.

—Satirist Fran Lebowitz, an inspiration to every sarcastic smart-ass who ever got herself booted out of high school.

Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

—Writer Gertrude Stein, who loomed large in the avant-garde circles of her day, and larger still in the privacy of her own mind.

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

—Kate Braverman, agitated author of the cult classic Lithium for Medea.

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.

—Stella Adler, Methodic mentor to big screen kings Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro.

(“If she were a character in a Greek play,” one interviewer concluded, “her flaw would be hubris.”)

I have a horror of death; the dead are so soon forgotten. But when I die, they'll have to remember me.

—Emily Dickinson, a poet far too singular to slip anybody's mind.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

—Margaret Fuller. The brilliant Bostonian who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a shocking exhibitionist when it came to her brain.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

—Prolific poet/prosaist May Sarton, a major menace to society.

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

—Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of America's nastiest national institutions.

Show me someone who never gossips, and I'll show you someone who isn't interested in people.

—Broadcast newswoman Barbara Walters, a very caring conversationalist.

Learning to speak is like learning to shoot.

—Professor Avital Ronell, comparative literature specialist, and a self-proclaimed “ivory-tower terrorist.”

The people I'm furious with are the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soap boxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. It's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.

—Screenwriter Anita Loos, who maintained that gentlemen were incapable of appreciating either brunettes or the basic facts of life.

I wasn't allowed to speak while my husband was alive, and since he's gone no one has been able to shut me up.

Nobody's interested in sweetness and light.

—God-like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. With a flick of her poisonous pen, she could write a Hollywood hopeful right out of the picture.

I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.

So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the strapping spokeswoman for nineteenth-century suffragists.

Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

—Tillie Olsen. After twenty years of transcribing other people's words, the long-suppressed author of Silences finally found her own voice.

We are all born charming, fresh and spontaneous, and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

—American etiquette maven, Miss Manners, née Judith Martin, apparently not to the (excruciatingly correct) manner born.

I am terribly shy, but of course no one believes me. Come to think of it, neither would I.

—Carol Channing. Shy, perhaps, but scarcely retiring: in her eighth decade of life, Hello Dolly is still a happening thing.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it.

Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.

—Writer Jane Wagner, the wry collaborative mind behind some of Lily Tomlin's best lines.

Gossip is news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.

—Syndicated columnist Liz Smith, dedicated to keeping a news-hungry nation apprised of the triumphs, tragedies, and predictable little peccadillos of those who live in (or for) the limelight.

A gossip is someone who talks to you about others, a bore is one who talks to you about himself, and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.

—Singer Lisa Kirk, waxing eloquent on the subject of oral emissions.

People call me feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

—Writer Rebecca West, puzzled (but not insulted) by the F-word.

My goal is to be accused of being strident.

—Susan Faludi, scribe of the stinging Backlash.