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Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

Margaret Halsey

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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Wells
Creatures
Compulsion
Well
Humor
Obscure
Hard
Four
Earn
Way
Hours
Humorous
Fact
Twenty
Hypersensitive
Living
Twenties
Taut
Often
Driven
Humorists
Facts
Tend
Neurotic

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
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Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey
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In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret Halsey
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Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.
Margaret Halsey
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The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
Margaret Halsey
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The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
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We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.
Margaret Halsey
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I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12 x 8 black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.
Margaret Halsey
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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
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the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.
Margaret Halsey
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
Margaret Halsey
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Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret Halsey
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It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
Margaret Halsey
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Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
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English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.
Margaret Halsey
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey
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Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret Halsey
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The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret Halsey
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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey