Cole Porter Quotes

I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all. So, tell me why should it be true, that I get a kick out of you?

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us".

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.

a college education I would never propose - a bachelor's degree won't even keep you in clothes

No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, Heaven knows, anything goes. The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today....

He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.

Every time I look down on this timeless town Whether blue or gray be her skies. Whether loud be her cheers or soft be her tears, More and more do I realize: I love Paris in the springtime. I love Paris in the fall. I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles, I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles. I love Paris every moment, Every moment of the year. I love Paris, why, oh why do I love Paris? Because my love is near.

He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

With apologies to Judy Garland and Cole Porter, all the world does NOT love a clown. John Wayne Gacy might have been the final nail in the coffin in terms of anyone associating clowns with funny (if a bunch of clowns die, do they all fit into one coffin?)

But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents. Lawyers are like Cole Porter and Alfred Lord Tennyson with a blender. A lawyer, for a reason or reasons known only to him or herself, cannot see a whole without dividing it into its parts and enumerating them in immense detail. This may be something to do with the billing system.

Be a clown, be a clown All the world loves a clown Show ‘em tricks, tell ‘em jokes And you’ll only stop with top folks.

If words could describe one's writing, then mine would be the love child of Cole Porter and Leonard Cohen, and reading it would be like listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing.

Life tells you how to live it, if you live long enough.

NED: I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men.

PARODY OF "YOU'RE THE TOP" BY COLE PORTER You're the pop You're the baby's father You're the pop But you needn't bother I will make no claim to your ancient name at all When I let you make me You promised you'd take me to the city hall My mistake wasn't getting plastered, What a break for the little b***stard I was bad when I let you get on top But if baby I'm the momma, You're the pop! [Sung by Elaine Stritch when interviewed by Michael Parkinson on YouTube.

I have never been a poster boy for serenity, but I knew I needed to restore some semblance of inner peace. In search of a fix much quicker than my weekly forays into the talking cure, I came upon an ancient and proven practice, one that exists in every culture and religious tradition as a means to attaining calm and an alternate plane of consciousness: an extended fast. Buddha did it, Jesus did it, even Pythagoras and George Bernard Shaw did it. It's like a Cole Porter song from the world's least-fun musical.

The Shortest Night of the Year" It rained the day before we met Then came 3 days that I forget And then my love we met again And I remember things from then I measure time by what we do And so my calendar is you The shortest day of the year Has the longest night of the year And the longest night is the shortest night with you. The Smallest Smile on your face Is the greatest kind of embrace And a single kiss is a thousand dreams come true The softest sigh, that is my strongest tie There’s you, there’s I, what can time do? The shortest day of the year Has the longest night of the year And the longest night is the shortest night with you. your softest sigh, that is my strongest tie There’s you, there’s I, what can time do? The shortest day of the year Has the longest night of the year And the longest night is the shortest night with you.

Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher’s basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein.

I start with the title first. From this title I work out the psychology of the tune. Next I write the lyric backward, and in this way build it up to a climax. In the lyric I work first for the climax, and if I can’t find a good climactic line I throw out the tune . . . I consult rhyme dictionaries. I swear by them. For long, easy rhymes I use Andrew Loring’s Lexicon. Other books I have in constant use are Roget’s ‘Thesaurus,’ and atlas, Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’ and a dictionary

In one slick move, he shoves his phone in his pocket and grabs me so we’re in front of the cabinet. His hand slides around the back of my neck, and before I can panic, he kisses me hard. Momentarily caught off guard, I just throw my arms around his neck and press my body against his. His kiss deepens until our tongues are twisting together, and I’m reminded of just how great a kisser he is. The lights flicker on, and Grayson pulls away from me with a grunt. I’m so flustered, it takes me a few seconds to collect myself enough to see a man wearing a suit and a hotel name badge eyeing us. “Excuse me, Mr. Cole, I’m afraid this office is off-limits for guests,” he says. I glance at Grayson and have to stop myself from laughing at the shade of my lipstick he’s now wearing. Grayson doesn’t miss a beat; he just grabs my hand and tugs me across the room. “I won’t mention this if you don’t,” he says as we pass by the hotel porter. I try for a sheepish smile as we walk past him. “Sorry,” I mouth. As we make it out to the hallway, a half-smothered giggle escapes before I can stop it. “You should probably go to the men’s room before you go back to the party.” A smile creases his lipstick-smeared mouth before he swipes his hand over it. “Yeah. This isn’t really my shade.” I snort a laugh and try to laugh off the kiss. But as I head back to the party, I’m well aware that kiss has only stirred a desire for another one. Not only that but as I pull my mirror out to check my own face, I realize something I didn’t in the heat of the moment. ​There was nothing fake about that kiss.

A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano.

I start with the title first. From this title I work out the psychology of the tune. Next I write the lyric backward, and in this way build it up to a climax. In the lyric I work first for the climax, and if I can’t find a good climactic line I throw out the tune . . . I consult rhyme dictionaries. I swear by them. For long, easy rhymes I use Andrew Loring’s Lexicon. Other books I have in constant use are Roget’s ‘Thesaurus,’ and atlas, Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’ and a dictionary.

woman marries, falls out of love with her husband after a time, and then if a male child arrives, shifts her passion from father to son. Something

Old Songs are more than tunes. They are little houses in which our hearts once lived. When we hear them we go visiting—we walk forgotten streets, we smile again at the skies of youth.

Porter’s next new Hollywood work, MGM’s High Society (1956), was second-division Porter. It hit his characteristic points—the Latin rhythm number in “Mind If I Make Love To You,” the charm song full of syncopation and “wrong” notes in “You’re Sensational.” Porter even turned himself inside out in two numbers for Louis Armstrong, “High Society Calypso” (the Afro-Caribbean anticipation of reggae had just begun to trend in America) and, in duet with Bing Crosby, “Now You Has Jazz.” And the film’s hit, “True Love,” is a waltz so simple neither the vocal nor the chorus has any syncopation whatever. This is smooth Porter, the Tin Pan Alley Porter who wants everyone to like him, even the tourists. Everything about High Society is smooth—to a fault. Armstrong gives it flair, but everyone else is so relaxed he or she might be bantering between acts on a telethon. These are pale replicas of the characters so memorably portrayed in MGM’s first go at this material, The Philadelphia Story, especially by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In their first moment, the two are in mid-fight; she breaks his golf clubs and he starts to take a swing at her, recalls himself to manly grace, and simply shoves her self-satisfied mug out of shot. This is not tough love. It’s real anger, and while Philip Barry, who wrote the Broadway Philadelphia Story, is remembered only as a boulevardier, he was in fact a deeply religious writer who interspersed romantic comedies with allegories on the human condition, much as Cole Porter moved between popular and elite composition. Underneath Barry’s Society folderol, provocative relationships undergo scrutiny as if in Christian parable; his characters are likable but worrisome—and, from First Couple Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on down, there is nothing worrisome in this High Society.

want to ride to the ridge where the west commences I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences Don’t fence me in. Cole Porter

Astaire had been told by the studio brass that he could have all the time he needed, so he planned for six weeks of rehearsal on the more difficult numbers (“Night and Day” and “The Table Dance”) that he imported from the stage production. Even though Astaire had played the role of Guy Holden, the man mistaken for Mimi’s (Ginger Rogers) divorce correspondent, on Broadway and in London, he was too much of a perfectionist to assume that he could reprise the dances on film without sufficient rehearsal. In addition, the Cole Porter score that he had sung in the theatre was, with the exception of “Night and Day,” completely scrapped and replaced with songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (after Porter refused producer Pandro Berman’s request to write new ones). Astaire wanted, and was given, the time to master the new material.

We’d found our social groove, and the more these dinners 
clicked, the more I felt like a dinner-jacketed Cole Porter, a gadfly of the Parisian bourgeoisie, a cosmopolitan homme de lettres. 
I also like getting hammered. 


You've got that thing, you've got that thing That thing that makes birds forget to sing Yes, you've got that thing, that certain thing You've got that charm, that subtle charm That makes young farmers desert the farm 'Cause you've got that thing, that certain thing You've got what Adam craved when he With love for Eve was tortured She only had an apple tree But you, you've got an orchard You've got those ways, those taking ways That make me rush off to Cartier's For a wedding ring, you've got that thing

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers “the boys” and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers.

dead at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Wedgwood Room, a venue of such high tone that Cole Porter himself descended

Theme It's a sunny weekday in early May and after a ham sandwich and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace, I am consumed by the wish to add something to one of the ancient themes– youth dancing with his eyes closed, for example, in the shadows of corruption and death, or the rise and fall of illustrious men strapped to the turning wheel of mischance and disaster. There is a slight breeze, just enough to bend the yellow tulips on their stems, but that hardly helps me echo the longing for immortality despite the roaring juggernaut of time, or the painful motif of Nature's cyclial return versus man's blind rush to the grave. I could loosen my shirt and lie down in the soft grass, sweet now after its first cutting, but that would not produce a record of the pursuit of the moth of eternal beauty or the despondency that attends the eventual dribble of the once gurgling fountain of creativity. So, as far as great topics go, that seems to leave only the fall from exuberant maturity into sudden, headlong decline– a subject that fills me with silence and leaves me with no choice but to spend the rest of the day sniffing the jasmine vine and surrendering to the ivory goverance of the piano by picking out with my index finger the melody notes of "Easy to Love," a song in which Cole Porter expresses, with put-on nonchalance, the hopelessness of a love brimming with desire and a hunger for affection, but met only and always with frosty disregard.

Trebuie să ne reamintim că, așa cum trupurile giganților din lumea sportului au fost adesea clădite cu hrană nesănătoasă, tot așa și imaginația se poate hrăni cu echivalente ”nesănătoase”, ieftine, comune. Ce contează este pasiunea, pentru că ea este predictorul cel mai bun al capacităților unui om, cât și cel mai eficient generator de motivație, dincolo de orice alt standard. Cole Porter spunea: ”Bănuiesc că o parte din libretele mele datorează mult acelor cărți necuviincioase”. Nu există hrană bună sau rea; hrana trebuie doar să satisfacă apetitul, iar apetitul își găsește de fiecare dată hrana potrivită.