Brendan Gill Quotes

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.

Parody is homage gone sour.

It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.

The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.

We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.