Top 100 Column Quotes
#1. I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.
[From a column dated November 17, 1928]
Dorothy Parker
#2. The program I use is called MED Soundstudio. It's basically a column of numbers that relate to pitch, duration, the type of sound. If I want to play a chord, I have to press keys on a keyboard - like a computer keyboard, on my Amiga - that relate to sharps and flats, note by note.
Max Tundra
#3. There may not be much future for the kind of sports column I did.
George Vecsey
#5. It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.
Ferdinand Mount
#6. In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, E. B. White praised the "little book" as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.
William Strunk Jr.
#7. Never look for the story in the 'lede.' Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.
William Safire
#8. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.
Carson McCullers
#9. Whoever becomes the head of the National Theater finds himself in a position like that of Nelson's Column - pigeons dump on you because you're there.
Peter Hall
#10. She became a morality tale stiff with Schadenfreude, and so many columnists made allusion to Icarus that Private Eye ran a special column.
Robert Galbraith
#11. Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.
Ken Thompson
#12. The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#13. I used to give her [my wife] to read the column every week before I sent it to the editors. And sometimes she was so mad - are you crazy? You're not going to send that, or, you're not going to write that about me. So I would go, OK. You have five hours. Go ahead, write the column yourself.
Sayed Kashua
#14. I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.
Don Marquis
#15. Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . .
Graham Greene
#16. I came in the league as not a shooter, not a scorer. My game was to play defense and make my teammates better. The most important stat to me was that left column - winning. Nothing else matters.
Jason Kidd
#17. There should be a new way to record standings in this league; one column for wins, one for losses and one for gifts.
Gene Mauch
#18. I graduated college in 1992 and didn't reach a sizable audience with my column for nine solid years. If I had started ten years later, or ten years sooner, everything could have happened sooner, obviously. But if I had started fifteen years later? I don't know.
Bill Simmons
#19. The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
Dennis Ritchie
#20. There is no question that, if you look at name recognition and celebrity, my opponent is far-and-away ahead. I think that if you put my beliefs in one column and her positions in another column, I am almost convinced that a majority of the people in the Democratic Party would support my beliefs.
Jonathan Tasini
#21. I've just been writing a column about the way in which Fallujah and New Orleans are looking to be twin towns in effect. They're both been worked over by the Bush Administration.
Martin Walker
#22. At last I have drawn a firm line under the truly astounding great column of figures and am done with pursuing that for which I am not sufficiently intelligent.
Robert Walser
#23. The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#24. I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
Salman Rushdie
#25. The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#26. I'm lyric conscious. I like to tell stories, give advice. Instead of writing a 'Dear Abby' column, I do it on records.
Betty Wright
#27. I indeed do respect all people for the positives in their life. Sadly, there comes a time of diminishing returns in the balance. At the end of the day, my respect is reserved for those solidly in the asset column of mankind.
Ted Nugent
#28. Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.
Art Buchwald
#29. All of our columnists have areas of interest and expertise that they will return to frequently, but the subject matter of any given column is up to them.
Andrew Rosenthal
#30. I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality.
Patricia Marx
#31. I wanted to be a columnist so badly that I took a huge pay cut to leave Forbes, which wouldn't give me a column, and join Newsday, which wanted my column for its Sunday business section.
Allan Sloan
#32. My mom was a big Elvis fan and a general pop culture buff, and so I grew up in a house filled with what were then called "movie magazines,"Before Elvis when Rhona Barrett wrote her column about the stars. And so it seeped in.
Laurie Foos
#34. For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.
Bobby Fischer
#35. Thence, even as he gazed, a tiny column of smoke rose straight up into the still air.
Kenneth Grahame
#36. This was another subject of criticism. She was being paid, as I recall, during the 1940's, what was then a princely sum, something like a dollar a word. I don't say that for the column, but for articles that she would write and things like that. And she made lots of speeches.
William A. Rusher
#37. This hype word bothers me though It always sounds like an accusation, what does it mean, advertising, column inches in the press? Bands themselves are never really responsible for all of that. That is something that happens to you when you sell millions of records.
Holly Johnson
#38. The sadness from reading letters that you know you can't help because it's a person who's in extremis and their problems are not soluble by an advice column.
Emily Yoffe
#39. I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they're due. That's why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me - the column has to be done, and there's no getting around it.
James Surowiecki
#40. Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.
Jo Bonner
#41. If she were human, I'd judge her to be in her mid-forties. That didn't sit in a negative column with her, though, because she gave off a smoldering, ripe sensuality that made youth look like a boring waste of time.
Jeaniene Frost
#42. Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space.
Jeremy Clarkson
#43. In some future America, there could be a plausible Michael Bloomberg path to the Democratic nomination. I would love to read a column by a smart person actually attempting to persuade me of this, using evidence.
Alex Pareene
#44. But the fact remains that according to the testimony of one of his own Nazi followers in the column, the physician Dr. Walther Schulz, which was supported by several other witnesses, Hitler "was the first to get up and turn back," leaving his dead and wounded comrades lying in the street. He
William L. Shirer
#45. I love sushi, but I'm not going to write a column about it.
Joel Stein
#46. You only worry about your head or spinal column. Everything else, some way or another, will repair in time.
Tony McCoy
#47. The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.
Sam Kean
#48. I lost my spinal column a good many years ago. There ain't no surgery can put it back. Even if there was, I wouldn't want it. I like it better this way. More comfortable.
David Goodis
#49. I asked him, How could we have a press column if we can't write about other work done in the press?
Sydney Schanberg
#50. For years, I've pushed the idea of a column compilation book mainly because it would be easy - I could just staple 'em all together. But publishers have been resistent, feeling the material dates.
Michael Musto
#51. Clip your year-end column and put it away for 10 years. See if you don't feel like an idiot when you reread it.
Steve Albini
#52. It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
Russell Baker
#53. A broken fortune is like a falling column; the lower it sinks, the greater weight it has to sustain.
Ovid
#54. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.
Pat Conroy
#55. Today's media zoom their cameras in on and dedicate endless column inches to wars, disasters, famines, scandals, tragedies, and every form of evil. Things beautiful, wholesome and good, however, are less photogenic, so the works of God and His servants are rarely noticed.
Jason Mandryk
#56. The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.
Terry Pratchett
#57. The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the astrology column seem factual by comparison.
John Allen Paulos
#58. I think one of the problems when we discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict is people talk too much in terms of, 'What's your preference?,' like politics is a Chinese menu - I'll take one from column A and two from column B. That's not what politics is about.
Norman Finkelstein
#59. I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.
Simon Schama
#60. Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then they were the fax machine, and then they were, you know, email. The anxiety remains the same, but the technology has changed.
Ellen Goodman
#61. Nobody from the administration has officially rejected my column.
Robert Novak
#62. I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.
Steven Pinker
#63. I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column.
David Plotz
#64. His fingers caressed the column of my tense throat. I shivered in fear. I hated not being able to see what was happening, it forced me to feel everything.
C.J. Roberts
#65. Ever building, building to the clouds, still building higher, and never reflecting that the poor narrow basis cannot sustain the giddy tottering column.
Friedrich Schiller
#66. When infuriated by an outrageous column, do not be suckered into responding with an abusive e-mail. Pundits so targeted thumb through these red-faced electronic missives with delight, saying 'Hah! Got to 'em.'
William Safire
#67. If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee.
Ayelet Waldman
#68. The column's worked out great for me. I've gotten a ton of ego satisfaction, had a lot of fun, won a batch of prizes and occasionally done some public good.
Allan Sloan
#69. I once recommended [in a San Francisco Chronicle column] that a third arm - a plastic arm - be sewn at the base of the spine so that people could have a tripod to sit on while waiting in line, and it was taken seriously.
Alan Abel
#70. An annoyed huff when he sees Trey suggests Max considers him an add-on rather than true Fifth Column. But he probably thinks the same about me. Too bad we can't just step aside and let Max save the day.
Rysa Walker
#71. They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.
Robert Scheer
#72. They passed it late in the afternoon, their single sail stretched to bursting, clinker-built hull heeling well over, bow slicing up a column of spray that salted mouths, eyes and bodies.
Garth Nix
#74. I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.
Al Yankovic
#75. It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.
Robert Scheer
#76. Jake Green isn't just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film's world of cons and games.
Guy Ritchie
#77. So I submit to you that what we represent is a Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that represents the best aspirations that human community is capable of, a Fifth Column that is willing to look at the structure of the psyche in contrast to the mess of society, and willing to dream.
Terence McKenna
#78. Lieutenant Paul T. Funkhouser from Evansville, Indiana, a twenty-three-year-old lawyer yet to practice his trade, led the way aboard his motorcycle. He kept riding back and forth to let the drivers know where to go, and then dashing off to the head of the column.
Stephen L. Harris
#79. I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
Malcolm Gladwell
#80. Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.
Ayn Rand
#81. A column about errors will contain errors.
Bill Gold
#82. You read the Miss Bea Haven column?" She sounded pleasantly surprised, almost flattered.
"Of course not. A column where the sexiest woman on earth pleasures herself with sex toys and then writes about it? Gross.
Tiffany Reisz
#83. Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.
Frank Moore Colby
#84. Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she'd never see again.
She took every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind.
Sarah J. Maas
#85. In my column series 'The Main Thing', I often talk about how Internet technology can improve the way people communicate - both within a business and between a business and its customers and partners.
Jim Barksdale
#86. Cast aside any column about two subjects. It means the pundit chickened out on the hard decision about what to write about that day.
William Safire
#87. Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe,
Arthur Conan Doyle
#88. My type of humor is almost pure identification. A housewife reads my column and says, 'But that's happened to ME! I know just what she's talking about!
Erma Bombeck
#89. Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.
D.H. Lawrence
#90. It's unfortunate that a certain type of stripped-down classicism became the in-house architectural language for 20th-century fascism. Can an architectural language recover from such an association? Yes, I think it can, because in the end what you're talking about is a column and beam.
David Chipperfield
#91. Don't assume you're always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that 'the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted.
Heloise
#92. Out there do'in it in the mountains...
I might not be a notable author for my quote, but the column I write is just that... surviving all Mother Nature can throw at you.
Abrams & Elliott
#93. Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?
Evangelista Torricelli
#94. And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, is marching along the road of 'progress' with the blind persistence of a column of ants.
George Orwell
#95. A century ago, scientists believed there was only one obvious stomping ground for alien biology in our solar system: Mars. Because it was reminiscent of Earth, Mars was assumed to be chock-a-block with animate beings, and its putative inhabitants got a lot of column inches and screen time.
Seth Shostak
#96. I think it's important that, as a matter of course, the brain and spinal column were removed from this cow, and that would be the material that would cause concern in terms of human health. And therefore we're confident in the safety of the food supply.
Ann Veneman
#97. He thought the column was magnificent, everything it said about old age was the best he had ever read, and it made no sense to end it with a decision that seemed more like a civil death.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#98. When I lose my column again, I'm sure I'll get hungry again. Maybe it's having a kid, but it's probably just getting to do what I always wanted to do - I'm really not that hungry.
Joel Stein
#99. The difference between an atheist and a person of faith? One additional religion in the crazy column. You believe that all religions except yours are crazy. I believe that all religions including yours are crazy.
Quentin R. Bufogle
#100. ...age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could.
Meg Wolitzer
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