Arthur Smith Quotes

An epitaph is a belated advertisement for a line of goods that has been discontinued.

I hold the record for the maximum number of obituaries written for an actor's career.

As I'm lying there at my funeral I would hope to hear somebody say, “Look, he's still moving!

It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.

How wonderful it was to sit on a set with Norman Mailer and get to know him.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white.

On the fortieth day after his death, we held the ceremony, and I performed for the very first time.

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.

An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.

The biggest problem is the funerals that don't exist. People call the funeral home, they pick up the body, they mail the ashes to you, no grief, no happiness, no remembrance, no nothing. That happens more often than it doesn't in the United States.

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.