Jessica Mitford Quotes

I grew up in a funeral home. Both my parents were morticians.

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed - transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

The mortician interviewing the corpses

First you have to have a dream.

MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.

Never take no for an answer. It took me 20 years between the time I wrote my first screenplay and the time I actually got money to direct a movie.

When you first start off, you see what other people have and quietly say, "I want that."

I would enjoy experiencing the hollowness of success at first- hand.

When I was about 15... I made my first attempt as a leading lady, and was, of course, a complete failure.

Being a man of the theater and a hedonist, I find the idea of building coffins very romantic.

The first step toward success will be the biggest one.

I bought a dictionary. First thing I did was, I looked up the word "dictionary", and it said "you're an asshole".

Dubai will never settle for anything less than first place.

My drive is still cool, it's not like how when I first began. I don't think anyone's drive is the same.

Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

To accomplish anything you must first have a mission, a goal, a hope, a vision.

Even from the first it is meek to seek the impossible.

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

To people who want to be rich and famous, I'd say, "Get rich first and see if that doesn't cover it."

First tell yourself what you want to be, then do what you need to do.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

What you aim for, in the first place, is to be as good as you can possibly be. This is what I do, and I'm going to try to be the best in the world.