Brendan Gill Quotes

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

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

My definition of a hero is a man who tests himself by a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last; he’s not competing in the world at all, he’s competing only against himself.

We pile one skyscraper next to another, so the squirrels could leap from one top to the next, and pretty soon we're living in the bottom of a well. Psychologically you feel uneasy. Feel in shadow. Something is threatening you. You're trapped inside something that is beyond the human scale, and none of the things we need, like light and air and the sun on our skins is any longer present.

Brendan Gill, who unkindly described Shirley as “a classic fat girl, with the fat girl’s air of clowning frivolity to mask no telling what depths of unexamined self-loathing,

Shawn’s patience was an extension of the unorthodox philosophy the magazine always had about its writers—all flowing from founder Harold Ross. Writers were a different, difficult, balky, and inexplicable breed, Ross maintained, speaking from hard experience. Beyond that, different writers produced at different speeds and were motivated by different impulses. It was all very mysterious. Talent could perhaps be nudged, but it couldn’t be stampeded. Thus, according to Brendan Gill, “lack of productivity [at The New Yorker] is neither rebuked nor deplored. On the contrary, it may be sneakingly admired, as proof that the magazine considers writing an occupation often difficult and sometimes, for the best writers, impossible.

George Eliot was so wounded by bad reviews that her lover and companion George Henry Lewes used to go through the papers and magazines to make sure she never saw one. And Brendan Gill tells a story about the American writer John O’Hara, who, among his many accomplishments, wrote the book for the Broadway musical Pal Joey: when some friends passed him on the streets of New York and told him that they had just seen Pal Joey again and had enjoyed it even more than they had the first time, O’Hara snapped, “What was wrong with it the first time?