Brendan Gill Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.

Parody is homage gone sour.

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.

We're going to take a closer look at how notification needs to occur.