Liz Smith (journalist) Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

A memoir is an exercise in vulgarity, candor, excess, and overkill.

Liz Smith
Gossip is not always bad or slanderous. I always say that gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin dress.

Liz Smith
Gossip is one of the great luxuries of a democracy. It is the tawdry jewel in the crown of free speech and free expression. You don't read gossip columns in dictatorships.

Liz Smith
I notice that many great poets emerge from motherless childhoods. They are either early orphans or their mothers are not mentioned at all. It is not so amazing that many of these same artists turned out to be hounded by depression, drugs, and insanity, but did being motherless also drive them to creativity?

Liz Smith
Listen, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Liz Smith
Mother as an ideal is unfair in the same manner as woman as a sex object.

Liz Smith
If you don't place your foot on the rope, you'll never cross the chasm.

Liz Smith
Most good gossip columnists have a touch of Savonarola in them.

Liz Smith
Gossip is for leisure, for fun, for entertainment, for relaxation. Should the day come when we are enduring big, black headlines about war, famine, terrorism, and natural disaster — then that kind of news will drive gossip underground and out of sight. Then, we won't have gossip to kick around any longer.

Liz Smith
Good gossip is just what's going on. Bad gossip is stuff that is salacious, mean and bitchy—the kind most people really enjoy.

Liz Smith
My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I have known, I wonder. The only really 'soulful' eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry.

Liz Smith
There is nothing that more obviously separates the powerful from the powerless than graciousness.

Liz Smith