George Jean Nathan Quotes - Page 2

Art is the sex of the imagination.

All one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand on the curb a few minutes and gaze intently at the sky.

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

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.

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

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

There is no legimate actor who can resist the powerful lure of the movies. It isn't the money that fetches him. It isn't the great publicity. It is simply this: the movies enable an actor to look at himself.

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.

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.

One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.

Shaw writes plays for the ages, the ages between five and twelve.

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.

The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.

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

A man may be said to love most truly that woman in whose company he can feel drowsy in comfort.

Musicals are to the theater what wines are to a substantial dinner.

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