Brendan Gill
Brendan Gill
Brendan Gillwrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth4 October 1914
CountryUnited States of America
levels intention scales
It is in the nature of the New Yorker to be as topical as possible, on a level that is often small in scale and playful in intention.
death mourning ends
To die quickly in one's eighth decade at the very top of one's powers is an enviable end, and not an occasion for mourning.
butterfly eye blue
I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.
summer morning order
The ingenuities we practice in order to appear admirable to ourselves would suffice to invent the telephone twice over on a rainy summer morning.
water gods-and-goddesses shapes
In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.
gone sour parody
Parody is homage gone sour.
gun pages tiny
The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers.
art notable graves
Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.
single-life faces facts
We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.
life ideas favors
Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
closer needs
We're going to take a closer look at how notification needs to occur.
country
Avain attempt to subdue that unsubduable country.
running war inspirational-life
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.