Gene Weingarten Quotations

I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known.

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.

Sometimes, homely things are done for the best reasons in the world and thus achieve a beauty of their own.

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

The whole point of corporate mascots is to be distinctive. No one in his right mind would ever confuse the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese.

When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.

I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.

What if this world of ours is not based on presumptions of magic? What if this world is really 'What we see is what we get'... Would that be so bad? ... There is a secular magic in everything around us. The world is beautiful. We have love; we should take care of each other. That is not a frightening concept for any parent to deliver to a child.

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.

While it is true that many hep C victims became infected through blood transfusions or organ transplants or in other innocent ways, mine was contracted during my college years, when I showed as much care for my personal health as your average suicide bomber.

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a 'massage parlor' that advertised in 'The Washington Post.'

I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

One of my favorite footnotes in the hypochondria book [The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death.] was about the death of one of the King Charleses. He was essentially bled and vomited to death by his doctors. They also drilled holes in his head.

I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.

I don't see a point in advertising my marital status when men don't. Completely ridiculous.

I do not believe in public shaming. I do believe that young adults go to college to learn things, and that this process will almost inevitably result in their making mistakes and misjudgments and otherwise acting badly.

Shakespeare was such a splendid vulgarian.

Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.

I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless.

I always thought there was some cleverness to the joke diet in which you could eat as much as you want and as often as you want, but everything must be consumed naked in front of a full-length mirror. That would deter me!

That is my theory to explain the I don't knows. It's human.

I feel like no matter what happens in my career endeavors after today, going to grad school is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I don't think there is prejudice against atheists the same way there is prejudice against fat people. I don't think people hate or contemn atheists; I think people feel sorry for atheists.

I believe that the fragile-flower, idea-intolerant society of victimhood that is being cultivated in many colleges today is really bad.

When my daughter was a senior in high school, I remember noticing, almost in passing, that her friends were very cute. Which made me realize her friends' fathers probably found Molly very cute.

One thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.

I am not saying Rubin Carter was guilty. I am saying he was very likely guilty.

It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots,

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.

I disagree with those who suggest that we permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it can kill you. That is sheer hysteria. I think we should permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it has been making us sick for quite a while.

I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be?

Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.

Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.