Andrew Schirmer

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential : Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“The trombone and side-drums in the chamber music of Stravinsky will do well enough in a very smart house-party where all the conversation is carried on in an esoteric family slang and the guests are expected to enjoy booby-traps. Very different is the outlook of some of our younger masters such as Hindemith, Jarnach, and others, whose renunciation of beauty was in itself a youthfully romantic gesture, and was accompanied by endless pains in securing adequate performance. The work of masterly performers can indeed alone save the new ideas from being swamped in a universal dullness which no external smartness can long distinguish from that commemorated in the Dunciad.”
― Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music

“The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just some fucking, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist, so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist.

So no. Pornography isn’t the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It’s the porn industry that’s the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”
― Jan Morris