George Jean Nathan Quotes

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

I drink to make other people interesting.

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.

I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

Art is the sex of the imagination.

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

What passes for woman's intuition is more often intrinsically nothing more than man's transparency.

All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.

The triumph of sugar over diabetes.

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.

Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.

Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work inthe brewery.

A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

Sex touches the heavens only when it simultaneously touches the gutter and the mud.

Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

Drama - what literature does at night.

An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.

Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.

The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers.