Edward Gorey
17 quotes
Biography
"Books. Cats. Life is Good."
"The helpful thought for which you lookIs written somewhere in a book."
"I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring."
"Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable."
"I think style chooses you... if I could choose, I would write like Jane Austen and I would draw like Rembrandt."
"If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either."
"Of course I believe in graphology, also palmistry, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, and all those other delicious things you can find in places like thesaurusi (can that be the plural? No, it can't, it must be thesauri), which turn out to mean prognostication by means of snail tracks or something."
"I used to maintain that if it couldn't be put into words it didn't exist; if anything I believe rather the opposite now."
"Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I'm gay. But I don't really identify with it much... I've never said I was gay, and I've never said I wasn't... What I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else."
"One scarcely knows to whom to complain."
"Edward Gorey on Wikipedia"
"Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin."
"This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating."
"I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things."
"If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed."
"The Suicide, as she is falling,Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appallingThe thought she will be dead so soon."
"Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you."