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Colin's avatar

As a young person it was a revelation to discover that the writers I liked most, the writers who had the deepest empathy and insight into the human condition, were also far and away the funniest. I've since come to realize it's a not incidental correlation. Here's a few doozies that still come to mind from time to time:

Flannery O’Connor: “She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”

Grahame Greene: “He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and ignorance.”

Kurt Vonnegut: “I could carve a better man out of a banana”

Edith Wharton: "He was like a merchant whose warehouse is crammed with an unmarketable commodity.”

Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.

Cormac McCarthy: If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin' around.”

Dorothy Parker: “What fresh Hell is this?"

JD Salinger: “She wrote to him fairly regularly from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.”

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