Edna Ferber Quotes - Page 4

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong.

[Women] ... is nothin' but little girls in long skirts, and their hair done up.

There's no sauce for play like work.

The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.

Now gae your wa'sTho'anes as gude As ever happit flesh and blude, Yet part we maunthe case sae hard is, Amang the writers and the bardies That lang they'll brook the auld I trow, Or neibours cry,'Weel brook the new'.

writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

Imported actors, like certain wines, sometimes do not stand the ocean trip. This can be as true of American actors in Europe as it is of European actors in America.

Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.

A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.

But almost any place is Baghdad if you don't know what will happen in it.

The astronomers tell us that other planets are gifted with two - four - even nine lavish moons. Imagine the romantic possibilities of nine moons.

Science had married the wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.

I like any place that isn't here.

Texas history is a varied, tempestuous, and vast as the state itself. Texas yesterday is unbelievable, but no more incredible than Texas today. Today's Texas is exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive.