Dorothy Parker

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

Dorothy Parker

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.

Woody Allen

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Anonymous conversation at Sushi Seki

Girl: What is that?
Guy #1: Tuna.
Girl: Tuna with what?
Guy #2: Tuna with delicious.

--Sushi Seki, 1st Avenue

Overheard by: KMR

Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.

Lech Walesa

I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things.

Walter Cronkite, on television news, 1997

With almost total unanimity, our big, corporate owners, infected with the greed that marks the end of the 20th Century, stretch constantly for ever-increasing profit, condemning quality to take the hindmost. If there is any solution to this problem it might be found in educating the share-holding public to their responsibility in owning this business which is fundamental to the preservation of our democracy.

If they understood the nature of this public service and treated their investment in it accordingly, we would be saved from compromising journalistic integrity in the mad scramble for ratings and circulation. In other words, if they did not expect the constantly increasing, unconscionable profits now expected from most investments but accepted a rational and steady return on their investment in this essential public service of newspapers and broadcast news.

Christiane Amanpour, keynote address, 2000

Yes I have often wondered why I …why we … do it? After a few seconds the answer used to come easily: because it matters, because the world will care once they see our stories … because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad guys will win. We do it because we are committed, because we are believers. One thing I knew for certain … I never could have sustained a relationship while I worked that hard, or was that driven by the story …

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility to at least stay alive.

That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son.

[ellipses in the original]

Edward R. Murrow, keynote address 1958

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Oct. 31, 2005

If only lies left semen stains.