I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.
In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.
To call Keegan a superstar is stretching a point.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
... the gustiest and gloriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damndest orator ever heard on this or any other earth ..., the champion boob-bumper of all epoches.
Referring to demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith:
What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.
My good qualities are under your protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasion for teasing and quarreling with you as often as may be.
Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
You know when someone's over-flattering you in a way. You smile but you can't believe it.
In the first years of the Queen's reign, the level of adulation - you wouldn't believe it. You really wouldn't.
It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.
Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.
Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.
The man who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he really possesses.
My husband, who's the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there's nothing he can't do, nothing. Just nothing.
Louie is hugely talented. But I get very annoyed at the way the media... say, 'Louis C.K. is the greatest stand-up in the world.' He's not the greatest stand-up in the world. He's not funnier than Dave Attell.
She sat down at the table and spent a good hour talking about her husband. She told Judith how they'd met, how he relentlessly pursued her, and finished by mentioning just a hundred or two of his special qualities. The only thing the man wasn't capable of was walking on water… yet. Judith made that comment when her friend paused for breath.
If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
