You can't pretend to be witty because wit is dry, subtle, lacerating, cynical, elitist, and risque - all impossible to fake. Humor, on the other hand, is broad, soothing, positive, inclusive, and smutty - to make sure everybody gets it. Pretending to be humorous is easy, and a great many people are doing it.

Florence King

A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.

Florence King

grandmother eggs home

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

Florence King

orchids stress simple

Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.

Florence King

wall relationship friendship

I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.

Florence King

nerves used children

I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.

Florence King

gun hatred people

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

Florence King

shopping may people

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

Florence King

personality waiting mind

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

Florence King

misanthrope mets punishment

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

Florence King

figures witty love

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.

Florence King

fool suffering doe

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

Florence King

ignorance littles way

My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.

Florence King

community heart people

If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.

Florence King

salt important worry

America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically more of an American than his parents. Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs called betters. Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.

Florence King

kings kids children

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

Florence King

love-you heart writing

Any hope that America would finally grow up vanished with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism, with its born-again regression, its pink-and-gold concept of heaven, its literal-mindedness, its rambunctious good cheer... its anti-intellectualism... its puerile hymns... and its faith-healing... are made to order for King Kid America.

Florence King

cheer kings christian

No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street

Florence King

bed matter sex

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.

Florence King

exercise golf people

To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.

Florence King

war mean america

There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his other's grave, but no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

Florence King

italian fighting country