Quote

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

Florence King

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Florence King
Age: 80 †
Born: 1936
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: January 6
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Washington
District of Columbia
Florence Virginia King
Famous
Worship
Fame
Learning
Education
Successful
Success
Hate

More quotes by Florence King

Image
When women talk about privacy they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about a room of one'sown refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.
Florence King
Image
I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.
Florence King
Image
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
Florence King
Image
Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.
Florence King
Image
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Florence King
Image
Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.
Florence King
Image
Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.
Florence King
Image
In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade.
Florence King
Image
Learn to spot and avoid writer groupies. The writer's self-sufficiency and our love for our work tend to attract insecure people who never can get enough love. They grow jealous of our work and come to regard it as a rival. These people can destroy you, so kick them out of your life or don't admit them in the first place.
Florence King
Image
Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football instead of building character, it tears it down.
Florence King
Image
Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.
Florence King
Image
Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football instead of building character, it tears it down.
Florence King
Image
For men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
Florence King
Image
Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.
Florence King
Image
We worship education but hate learning.
Florence King
Image
America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.
Florence King
Image
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.
Florence King
Image
Spinsterhood is Nature's Own Feminism.
Florence King
Image
There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin
Florence King
Image
Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, This is good enough for you. The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
Florence King