Quotes By Mason Cooley

Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?

Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

Friends are sometimes boring, but enemies never.

Faith moves mountains, but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.

The body has a mind of its own.

Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.

We are prepared for insults, but compliments leave us baffled.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Love begins with an image; lust with a sensation.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

The time I kill is killing me.

Journalism never admits that nothing much is happening.

While we are reading, we are all Don Quixote.

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

Many gloat over their own troubles.

To be successful be ahead of your time, but only a little.

Fears and lies intensify consciousness.

Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.

Most reputations are not ruined but forgotten.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

In the street, the gaze of desire is furtive or menacing.

Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?

The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.

A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places.

The gods are watching, but idly, yawning.

Reputation runs behind the current state of affairs.

Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness.