Edna Ferber Quotes - Page 3

No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.

One can summon courage and fortitude to face tragedy; irritations and frustrations are a cloud of mosquitoes that nip and sting and drive one frantic.

here in Texas maybe we've got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness.

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

Emma McChesney was engaged in that nerve-wracking process known as getting things out of the way. When Emma McChesney aimed to get things out of the way she did not use a shovel; she used a road-drag.

Men often marry their mothers.

Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. ... Roast Beef, Medium, is safe, and sane, and sure.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

Take Texas the way Texas takes bourbon. Straight. It goes down easier.

People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.

Nicknames are fond names. We do not give them to people we dislike.

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.

Christmas is not a season. It is a feeling.

Most of the men regarded Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography Rheims, Rhine, Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or Würzburg were not localities but libations.

Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.

But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.

A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points.