Quotes from John O'Hara

They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

Well, men go to musicals. Women are the ones that buy the tickets for plays.

Never play cards with a man named Doc, and never eat at a place called Mom's.

An artist is his own fault.

Little old ladies of both sexes. Why do I let them bother me?

He apprisiated my singing I will say that for him altho always asking why didnt I sing like Oh you beautiful doll which you are too young to remember and so am I but the story I hear is that when the Titantic went down (a ship) people sang it or hummed a couple bars and then said the hell with this and jumped the hell off the boat so they would not have to finish singing it.

Girls fitted easily into their own and your own picture of someone dying of unrequited love. If they slipped out of it before you were ready, that was all right too; their slipping out frequently was the necessary reminder that an affair had run its course. It also was the necessary reminder that the realist in a woman, the good appraiser, makes her want to take a loss and get out before she is—for the purposes of the analogy—ruined.

Well Merry Christmas, as the saying goes. Guess I will have to go to bed for 24 hrs so I dont have to stop hating my fellow men. But that does not go for you, Ted. The best. Pal Joey

A nite or so after I went in Nick's again and was having a cup of coffee and once more I heard somebody out in the kitchen yell "right" and a couple minutes later out came a jelly omlet and once more Nick looked at me and said could I eat a jelly omlet and I said I could force one and he assured me that there was nothing phony about it but go ahead and eat it and it was as good a jelly omlet as any jelly omlet I ever ate.

Well, Chum, the poor man's Bing Crosby is still making with the throat here in Chi. but if the present good fortune keeps up I ought to be getting the New York break pretty soon.

As for you my ex-pal you know what you can do and also you can sing for the $20 I owe you. I am making a little trip to N.Y. in the near future and we will have a little talk and you can explain your positon, altho the way I feel now if I saw you now your positon would be horizontle. I might as well tell you I am going to the gym 3 or 4 times a week and not that I need it because I always could slap you around when ever I wanted to. You know what you can do. Your Ex-Pal Joey

I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.

They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

The trouble is people leave too much to luck. They get married and then trust to luck. They should be sure in the first place.

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.

George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to.

When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.

The people who want regeneration to be permanent are fanatics for the happy ending, dissatisfied with themselves and with anyone else, unrealistic men and women, anti-Christs, who were entertained by the miracles but learned nothing from Calvary.

Bing: You're a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn't go your way, anything that you can't have you destroy.

The liquor, that is, the rye, was all about the same: most people bought drug store rye on prescriptions (the physicians who were club members saved 'scrips' for their patients), and cut it with alcohol and colored water. It was not poisonous, and it got you tight, which was all that was required of it and all that could be said for it.

I love you? Yes, I love you. Like saying I have cancer.

There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on.

It made a change in himself, and we must not change ourselves much. We can stand only so many—so few—changes. To know that there were people who he thought were his friends, his good friends, but who were his enemies—that was going to make a change, he knew. When was the last time there had been a change in himself? He thought and thought, rejecting items that were not change but only removal or adornment.

On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before. One minute she was asleep, the next she was completely awake and dumped into despair. It was the kind of despair that she had known perhaps two thousand times before, there being 365 mornings in a calendar year.