Lgbt People

"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?"

"If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?"

"If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?"

"For fast acting relief, try slowing down."

"Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed."

"It's a more ridiculing, divisive humor today, especially with the advent of political incorrectness, which is a license to be as ridiculing and awful about certain groups... There should be room for everybody, absolutely, and then the culture is going to decide the prevailing weight. We can't decide it individually. Nobody is here without a reason. … I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy — from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated — but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it."

"Listen, I have no judgment about anything. Some people will bring certain celebrities up to me who are presumably — or known to be — gay and ask "Why don't they come out?" But we don't know why they don't, and it's none of our business, really. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75 — it would have been a hard thing to do at that time."

"Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship."

"I respect her talent and her brain and who she is as a person — and that kind of admiration and respect is a big factor in binding someone in a relationship. I know what a good heart she has, and how empathetic she is with all kinds of people and issues — she's so brilliant on top of it that she can voice these things. And she's as funny as she can possibly be. She makes me laugh."

"Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. … I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 — the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, "Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue." So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away."

"9 to 5 made people aware of equal pay for equal work. It hasn't really happened, but it has come closer. We're aware of sexual harassment, and of course, there are very few companies that have daycare centers, which seems to me would be the most humane, positive thing to do for a worker. The worker would be more loyal, they'd be more productive. It's so crazy not to do the human thing. It seems to me to be much more profitable to do the human thing. It just makes a better society."

"The point I want to make is, the idea that people will say — out of the 170,000 people or however many were killed in the tsunami — they'll say, "God saved me." As if God particularly saved this person. There's a tremendous amount of narcissism in that belief, that God is speaking directly to you. I mean, it's unbelievable. … All these disparate opinions and points of view that people say they're getting as direct divine guidance — I've been concerned for decades about presidents who claim to be born again. And knowing that everyone I knew in the fundamentalist church or in the evangelical Christian church — they wanted the rapture to come. … We don't have to save the environment, because we're not going to be around."

"We went to a Southern Baptist church. When I was a small child, until I was about 8 or 9 years old, I worried if I didn't go forward and get saved every Sunday — which I couldn't do, it was absolutely too humiliating to see these adults flailing and beating their breasts and sobbing, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is so ridiculous, so embarrassing — I could never bring myself to go forward. And I'd think, Oh, my God, if I don't go next Sunday, if the end of the world comes, I'll go to hell. And that's is a pretty hard thing for a 7- or 8-year-old to carry all the time"

"The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral. ... There are great clergy-people who absolutely do not agree with this. It's not whether God is on our side or whether we're doing God's will, it's being so narcissistic as to think that God is telling you what to do."

"People think there's some real subversive thing playing against whoever it is; a lot of it is just people who want to go along and get along. And they also want to make money. And the bottom line is, they're going to put out as much stuff as they can — stupid, banal stuff that makes money."

"When you talk about yourself for 35 years, first of all, it gets repetitious. And then it seems a little bit excessive, at the least."

"I feel some part of me can wake up and be very existential and the next day wake up and be sort of in love with the universe."

"Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?"

"If you can't be direct, why be?"

"I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness."

"What if it's boring... or if it's not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring."

"There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic."

"Truth is, I've always been selling out. The difference is that in the past, I looked like I had integrity because there were no buyers."

"I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk..."

"And that's the truth!"

"I got myself into a lovely little—shall we say controversy—with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries."

"Blue Moon, You knew just what I was there for, You heard me saying a prayer for, Someone I really could care for."

"Blue Moon, Now I'm no longer alone, Without a dream in my heart, Without a love of my own."

"Blue Moon, You saw me standing alone, Without a dream in my heart, Without a love of my own."

"And all at once I lost my breath And all at once was scared to death For all at once I owned the earth and sky. Now I've met Miss Jones We'll keep on meeting till we die, Yes, Miss Jones and I."

"I'm wild again, beguiled again A simpering, whimpering child again; Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - am I. Couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep When love came and told me, I shouldn't sleep; Bewitched, bothered and bewildered - am I. I'm wild again! Beguiled again! A simpering, whimpering child again, Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I."

"Bless our Mountain Greenery home! In a mountain greenery Where God paints the scenery Just two crazy people together"

"She gets too hungry for dinner at eight... She likes a crap game, but never come late... She'd never bother with people she hates... That's why the lady is a tramp."

"Sins are sin-begotten, and their seed Bred of itself and singly procreative; Nor is God served with setting this to this For evil evidence of several shame, That one may say, Lo now! so many are they; But if one, seeing with God-illumined eyes In his full face the encountering face of sin, Smite once the one high-fronted head, and slay, His will we call good service. For myself, If ye will make a counsellor of me, I bid you set your hearts against one thing To burn it up, and keep your hearts on fire, Not seeking here a sign and there a sign, Nor curious of all casual sufferances, But steadfast to the undoing of that thing done Whereof ye know the being, however it be, And all the doing abominable of God. Who questions with a snake if the snake sting? Who reasons of the lightning if it burn? While these things are, deadly will these things be; And so the curse that comes of cursed faith."

"I must say that in my judgment Swinburne's claims are immeasurably superior to those of any Englishman now living... Please read in the Volume I send, published two years ago, the 'Seamew,' the 'Jacobite's Exile,' the 'Threnody on Inchbold,' and 'The Commonweal,' his Jubilee Ode, and then consider whether any can touch him as a Poet. I believe that in the long run Public opinion will be more shocked by his neglect than by his recognition."

"Mr. Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate of England. The fact that his appointment to this high post has not been degraded by official confirmation renders his position all the more unassailable. He whom all poets love is the Laureate Poet always."

"Mr. Swinburne … expresses in verse what he finds in books as passionately as a poet expresses what he finds in life."

"Swinburne was perpetually talking shop: the bookish spirit in which he looked on nature and mankind, with his head full of his own trade, is essentially the same as the spirit in which The Tailor and Cutter annually criticises the portraits in the Royal Academy, interested, not in the artist, not in the subject, but in the cut of the subject's clothes."

"I loved Swinburne and Masefield and all the other great sea poets."

"I attempt to describe Mr. Swinburne; and lo! the Bacchanal screams, the sterile Dolores sweats, serpents dance, men and women wrench, wriggle and foam in an endless alliteration of heated and meaningless words, the veriest garbage of Baudelaire flowered over with the epithets of the Della Cruscans."

"Æschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness. "But in any wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness": this is the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident, than the impression of the doctrine of Æschylus. Fate, irreversible and inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we trace the sign, in the upshot of Othello or King Lear. The last step into the darkness remained to be taken by "the most tragic" of all English poets. With Shakespeare — and assuredly not with Æschylus — righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the masterdom of fate: but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster, seems merely the servant or the synonym of chance. The two chief agents in his two great tragedies pass away — the phrase was, perhaps, unconsciously repeated — "in a mist": perplexed, indomitable, defiant of hope and fear bitter and sceptical and bloody in penitence or impenitence alike. And the mist which encompasses the departing spirits of these moody and mocking men of blood seems equally to involve the lives of their chastisers and their victims. Blind accident and blundering mishap — "such a mistake", says one of the criminals, "as I have often seen in a play" — are the steersmen of their fortunes and the doomsmen of their deeds. The effect of this method or the result of this view, whether adopted for dramatic objects or ingrained in the writer's temperament, is equally fit for pure tragedy and unfit for any form of drama not purely tragic in evolution and event."

"I. But he hears not. Now, my warrior guests, I drink to the onward passage of his soul Death. Had my hand turned coward or played me false, This man that is my hand, and less than I And less than he bloodguilty, this my death Had been my husband's: now he has left it me. [Drinks] How innocent are all but he and I No time is mine to tell you. Truth shall tell. I pardon thee, my husband: pardon me. [Dies]"

"Did I bid thee Mock, and forget me for thy friend — I say not, King? Is thy heart so light and lean a thing, So loose in faith and faint in love? I bade thee Stand to me, help me, hold my hand in thine And give my heart back answer. This it is, Old friend and fool, that gnaws my life in twain — The worm that writhes and feeds about my heart — The devil and God are crying in either ear One murderous word for ever, night and day, Dark day and deadly night and deadly day, Can she love thee who slewest her father? I Love her."

"Not from without us, only from within, Comes or can ever come upon us light Whereby the soul keeps ever truth in sight. No truth, no strength, no comfort man may win, No grace for guidance, no release from sin, Save of his own soul's giving."

"Stately, kindly, lordly friend Condescend Here to sit by me."

"Though they be Ill rulers of this household, be not thou Too swift to strike ere time be ripe to strike, Nor then by darkling stroke, against them: I Have erred, who thought by wrong to vanquish wrong, To smite by violence violence, and by night Put out the power of darkness: time shall bring A better way than mine, if God's will be — As how should God's will be not? — to redeem Venice. I was not worthy — nor may man, Till one as Christ shall come again, be found Worthy to think, speak, strike, foresee, foretell, The thought, the word, the stroke, the dawn, the day, That verily and indeed shall bid the dead Live, and this old dear land of all men's love Arise and shine for ever: but if Christ Came, haply such an one may come, and do With hands and heart as pure as his a work That priests themselves may mar not."

"They do not ill, being lords of ours, to slay Me; nay, they could not spare: but thee to slay, To spill thy strong young life for truth to me, In all men's eyes would mark them monstrous: thou Must live, and serve my slayers, and serving them Sustain my memory by the proof — if God Shall give thee grace to prove it — that thy name, Thy father's name and mine, in true men's ears Rings truth, and means not treason."

"Farewell, and peace be with you if it may. I have lost, ye have won this hazard: yet perchance My loss may shine yet goodlier than your gain When time and God give judgment. If there be Truth, true is this, that I desired the right And ye with hands as red sustain the wrong As mine had been in triumph. Have your will: And God send each no bitterer end than mine."

"I believe Not more in God's word than in yours; and this Not for your station's sake, nor yet your fame's, How high soe'er the wind of war have blown The splendour of your standard: but, my lord, Your face and heart and speech, being one, require Of any not base-born and servile-souled Faith: and my faith I give you."

"Friends, citizens, and brethren. This our friend Hath given you by my charge to know of me Thus much, that if your ends and mine be one, As one our wrongs are, and this people's need One, toward the goal forefelt of our desire No heart shall beat, no foot shall press, no hand Strain, strive, and strike with steadier will than mine And faith more strenuous toward the purpose. This If ye believe not, here our hope hath end; If ye believe, here under happier stars Begins the date of Venice."