Brendan Gill Quotes

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

  Brendan Gill

  Life, Motivational, Spiritual

  51 Copy quote

• 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.

  Brendan Gill

  Single Life, Faces, Facts

  7 Copy quote

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

  Brendan Gill

  Art, Notable, Obscenity

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Brendan Gill

  Death, Mourning, Ends

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Brendan Gill

  Summer, Morning, Order

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Brendan Gill

  Running, War, Inspirational Life

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Brendan Gill

  Gun, Events, Pages

  Brendan Gill (1975). “Here at the New Yorker”

  7 Copy quote

• In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

  Brendan Gill

  Water, Gods And Goddesses, Shapes

  1982 Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.

  23 Copy quote

• Parody is homage gone sour.

  Brendan Gill

  Gone, Parody, Sour

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

  20 Copy quote

• Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

  Brendan Gill

  Country

  1990 Of Cromwell's settlement of Scots in the north of Ireland. A NewYork Life.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Brendan Gill

  Levels, Intention, Scales

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Brendan Gill

  Butterfly, Eye, Clouds

  BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

  9 Copy quote

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin