82 Quotes by George Jean Nathan

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.

An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn’t want to drink with even if he did.

A man’s wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn’t understand, he wants to know if she’s tired.

Like everybody else, when I don’t know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.

[A] man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

The theatre is an escape from reality.

Theatre is what literature does at night.

The notion that as a man grows older, his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.