George Jean Nathan Quotes
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.
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
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.
The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.
It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.
A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.
In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.
Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.
Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.
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.
What passes for woman's intuition is more often intrinsically nothing more than man's transparency.
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.
All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.
A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
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.
Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.
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.
Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.
I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.
A broken heart is a monument to a love that will never die; fulfillment is a monument to a love that is already on its deathbed.
The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
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.
Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
