Michael Wolff Quote

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I could call up Arianna and confirm the best story I know about these dinner parties. But I don’t want it not to be true. I tell my children this story as an example of savvy and pluck. (I have heard it from three different people.)

Arianna set about having dinner parties, inviting the most prestigious New Yorkers who would come and, at an appointed hour, she would deliver an impromptu toast, fifteen minutes or more of sweeping, seamless, knowing, witty observations, the likes of which no awkward table in New York had ever heard before. Grown men, those attracted to ambitious women anyway, swooned. When, ultimately, it got out that these toasts were written and rehearsed, that only added to the allure. Indeed, this is what I tell my children: it’s not the effortlessness but the effort that goes into making it effortless. In praise of artifice, if you will.

– Michael Wolff, Too Famous



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Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)

Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels):


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The rituals of obsessive neurosis are such that Freud compares this pathology to a “private religion.”


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Some books are written to be read, others only to have been written.


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Along the lines of thinking the glass is half full or half empty, some people who believe they’re in danger of dying are in fact in danger of living.


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Proverb for artists: when art fails, chance succeeds.


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Rumour is certainly related to fantasy, but it can also be related to tactics.


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To be the object of ridicule, but to put on a good show.


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