Quotes from George Jean Nathan

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.

Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the artist's fame.

Art is the sex of imagination.

I drink to make other people interesting." or "I only drink to make other people seem more interesting.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

What passes for woman's intuition is more often intrinsically nothing more than man's transparency.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.

Although I myself, due doubtless to defective skill, have to work pretty hard, I do not believe in too hard work... A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work inthe brewery.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.