Best 43 quotes of Edward Gorey on MyQuotes

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.

A small and sinister snow seems to be coming down relentlessly at present. The radio says it is eventually going to be sleet and rain, but I don't think so; I think it is just going to go on and on, coming down, until the whole world...etc. It has that look.

Books, Cats, Life is Good.

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

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

Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.

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.

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

I feel that I am doing the minimum amount of damage to other possibilities that may take place in a reader's head.

If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another.

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

If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point.

If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children — oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense, either.

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

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

I realize that homosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is - but then, of course, heterosexuality is a serious problem for anyone who is, too. And being a man is a serious problem and being a woman is, too. Lots of things are problems.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am.

I should like a parsley sandwich. To the best of my knowledge they are not in season.

I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones.

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

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

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

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards.

...my least favorite actress of all time, Helena Bonham Carter. I find her lack of a neck very off-putting and especially her acting.

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.

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.

Such excess of passion is quite out of fashion

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

There was a young lady named Mae Who smoked without stopping all day; As pack followed pack, Her lungs first turned black, And eventually rotted away.

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

The world may think it idiotic, Nor care at all we're symbiotic, But I will say at once and twice: I find it nice. I find it nice.

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.

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

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

Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...

On the way home I absently minded (you know what I mean) went through a stop sign in Hyannis so of course there was a police car to apprehend me. A soft answer turnethed away wrath, fortunately.

The Baron told her that only art meant anything.

The light is fading from the day. The rest is darkness and dismay.

The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, 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 have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside.

You never really choose anything. It's all presented to you, and then you have alternatives.