Top 12 Quotes by Brendan Gill

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Life, Motivational, Spiritual

We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.

Brendan Gill

Single Life, Faces, Facts

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Brendan Gill

Art, Notable, Obscenity

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.

Brendan Gill

Death, Mourning, Ends

BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

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

Brendan Gill

Summer, Morning, Order

BRENDAN GILL (1975). “HER AT THE NEW YORKER”

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

Brendan Gill

Running, War, Inspirational Life

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.

Brendan Gill

Gun, Events, Pages

Brendan Gill (1975). “Here at the New Yorker”

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.

Brendan Gill

Water, Gods And Goddesses, Shapes

1982 Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.