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Liz Smith
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“Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.”
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“I notice that many great poets emerge from motherless childhoods. They are either early orphans or their mothers are not mentioned at all. It is not so amazing that many of these same artists turned out to be hounded by depression, drugs, and insanity, but did being motherless also drive them to creativity?”
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“Mother as an ideal is unfair in the same manner as woman as a sex object.”
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“My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I have known, I wonder. The only really 'soulful' eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry.”
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“There is nothing that more obviously separates the powerful from the powerless than graciousness.”
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“[On celebrity journalism:] Go back to that wonderful Alan Jay Lerner song in Camelot, the one about 'I wonder what the king is doing tonight.' We really want to know what the king is up to. It must be something bred into us from peasantry.”
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“If you don't place your foot on the rope, you'll never cross the chasm.”
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“[On being a gossip columnist:] ... in this particular job you're constantly finding out how much integrity you have every day.”
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“... bad gossip drives out good gossip.”
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“Gossip is a news story with a lot of leeway.”
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“Listen, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
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“Gossip is one of the great luxuries of a democracy. It is the tawdry jewel in the crown of free speech and free expression. You don't read gossip columns in dictatorships.”
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“A memoir is an exercise in vulgarity, candor, excess, and overkill.”
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“I don't repeat gossip — so listen carefully.”
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“Most of us aren't as clean as a hound's tooth. But most of us aren't running for President.”
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“I think that some public figures are more fair game than others. It's gloves off on politicians and people whose public image is perfection, like the televangelists — Jim Bakker — people who claim to be spiritual or moral leaders. They are the whited sepulchers waiting for our graffiti.”
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“Be a part of the solution to avoid being part of the problem. Assistants and workers who love to deposit 'insoluble' problems at the feet of their employers like dead kittens will always remain in assistant positions.”
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“Begin somewhere; you can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.”
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“All weddings, except those with shotguns in evidence, are wonderful.”
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“I wanted to work hard and be so absorbed that sleep would fall on me nightly like a blessing.”
Liz Smith, U.S. columnist, writer
(1923)
Full name: Mary Elizabeth Smith.