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CALIFORNIA
In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist.
Truman Capote
California: The west coast of Iowa.
Joan Didion
It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
Truman Capote
CHASTITY
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
Aldous Huxley
Chastity always takes it's toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
Karl Kraus
CHILDREN
I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford
The secret of dealing with a child is not to be it's parent.
Mell Lazarus
I like children. If they're properly cooked.
W.C. Fields
By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces.
Christopher Morley
Insanity is hereditary; you can get it from your children.
Sam Levenson
Go back to reform school, you little nose-picker.
W.C. Fields
A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
Fran Lebowitz
CLUB
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
Groucho Marx
COEDS
If all these sweet young things were laid end to end, I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised.
Dorothy Parker
COMMUNISM
Communism is like one big phone company.
Lenny Bruce
CONSCIENCE
Conscience is like a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H.L. Mencken
The inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
CONVERSATION
Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.
Alfred Hitchcock
If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.
James McNeill Whistler
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw
COURAGE
Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
Horace Smith
CRITICS AND CRITICISM
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Channing Pollock
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
Critics are a dissembling, dishonest contemptible race of men. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
John Osborne
Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
The House Beautiful is the play lousy.
Dorothy Parker
Number Seven opened last night. It was misnamed by five.
Alexander Woollcott
I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions- the curtin was up.
George S. Kaufman
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
Dorothy Parker reviewing The House on Pooh Corner
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
Heinrich Heine
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker on Katherine Hepburn
I never watch the Dinah Shore show- I'm a diabetic.
Oscar Levant
CYNIC
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H.L. Mencken
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Ambrose Bierce
CYNICISM
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
Lillian Hellman
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw
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