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.

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.

My favorite journey is looking out the window.

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

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

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.

The helpful thought for which you look Is written somewhere in a book.

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

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.

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

When people are finding meaning in things -- beware.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Only art means anything.

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

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

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.

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

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

Such excess of passion is quite out of fashion