Edward Gorey Quotes

Books, Cats, Life is Good.

There are so many things we've been brought up to believe that it takes you an awfully long time to realize that they aren't you.

It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.

My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.

If something doesn't creep into a drawing that you're not prepared for, you might as well not have drawn it.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

The helpful thought for which you look Is 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.

Some tiny creature, mad with wrath, is coming nearer on the path.

When people are finding meaning in things -- beware.

My favorite journey is looking out the window.

Neither mine nor other people's prospects seem particularly pleasing just at the moment, and I have fantasies of going to Iceland, never to return. As it is, I tell myself not to remember the past, not to hope or fear for the future, and not to think in the present, a comprehensive program that will undoubtedly have very little success.

God knows, there's enough to worry about without worrying about worrying about things.

A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.

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.

More is happening out there than we are aware of. It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.

I tend to be rather inconsequential and trail off.

I should like a parsley sandwich. To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

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.

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

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.

Such excess of passion is quite out of fashion

To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.

I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards.

Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

What is, is, and what might have been could never have existed.

Ideally, if anything [was] any good, it would be indescribable.

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is - but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.

The world may think it idiotic, Nor care at all we're symbiotic, But I will say at once and twice: I find it nice. I find it nice.

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

Not everything in life can be interpreted metaphorically; that's because things fall out on the way.

I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point.

The Suicide, as she is falling, Illuminated by the moon, Regrets her act, and finds appalling The thought she will be dead so soon.

Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.

Interviewer: What is your greatest regret? Gorey: That I don't have one

Only art means anything.

I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader's head.

...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.

Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.

There was a young lady named Mae Who smoked without stopping all day; As pack followed pack, Her lungs first turned black, And eventually rotted away.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am.