Edward Gorey

"Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable."

"I think style chooses you... if I could choose, I would write like Jane Austen and I would draw like Rembrandt."

"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."

"Of course I believe in graphology, also palmistry, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, and all those other delicious things you can find in places like thesaurusi (can that be the plural? No, it can't, it must be thesauri), which turn out to mean prognostication by means of snail tracks or something."

"I used to maintain that if it couldn't be put into words it didn't exist; if anything I believe rather the opposite now."

"Well, I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I suppose I'm gay. But I don't really identify with it much... I've never said I was gay, and I've never said I wasn't... What I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else."

"One scarcely knows to whom to complain."