Norman Lindsay Quotes

[H]e was a very well-bred young fellow, polite in his manners, graceful in his attitudes, and able to converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets.

Take my advice, don't carry bags,
For bags are just as bad as swags; They're never made to measure.
To see the world, your simple trick
Is but to take a walking-stick— Assume an air of pleasure,
And tell the people near and far
You stroll about because you are A Gentleman of Leisure.

Whiskers alone are bad enough
Attached to faces coarse and rough
But how much greater their offence is
When stuck on Uncles' countenances

I am fanatic enough to believe that my thought is something the world needs.

A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'

If anyone assumes that going one's own way is the easy way, they are very much in error. There's no harder way to go.

A man’s self-respect is curiously involved with his ability to force a community to disburse certain sums of money for his maintenance and diversion. I have done thirty years of journalism, including jam-labels and inducements to use hair-restorers, and my conscience is undisturbed.

If I didn’t escape at intervals with straws in my hair and commit a thoroughly idiotic, irresponsible and undignified piece of foolery, such as having a newspaper row with a politician over the banning of Redheap, for instance, I should have no other resource but to take myself seriously as an artist, and perish in a just conviction of ignominy.

The peculiar rigidity of the English mind is seen at its noblest in the Times literary supplement.

There is something extremely disgusting in having one's work pawed by policemen.

Oh, no, no, no! Couldn't think of it. It's a very dangerous book. Had a very bad influence.

The best love affairs are those we never had.

They were a bloodthirsty lot, those sentimentalists who wept for the sad lot of the working classes.

Livingstone Hopkins had an infirmity common to most professional humorists; in himself, he was quite humourless.

Words are cheap currency, but coin of the realm has the sincerity on it.