Janet Flanner Quotations

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.

The stench of human wreckage in which the Nazi regime finally sank down to defeat has been the most shocking fact of modern times.

By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

I am invariably and have been since adolescence inimical to the Republican mind which shows at the most inflated size the bad qualities of the bourgeoisie rather than the good qualities of the middle class which the Democrats call forth.

I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes.