Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Gene Weingarten

The whole point of corporate mascots is to be distinctive. No one in his right mind would ever confuse the Hamburglar with Mayor McCheese.

The Pulitzer is a crapshoot. Your piece has to hit a few people the right way at the right moment.

While it is true that many hep C victims became infected through blood transfusions or organ transplants or in other innocent ways, mine was contracted during my college years, when I showed as much care for my personal health as your average suicide bomber.

For $60, I once bought a neck massage at a 'massage parlor' that advertised in 'The Washington Post.'

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.

Sometimes, homely things are done for the best reasons in the world and thus achieve a beauty of their own.

I am the most skilled parallel parker the world has ever known.

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.

I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.

When she was too young to resist, or even to understand, I turned my daughter into a lifelong, rabid Yankees fan.

I don't consider Hillary Clinton to be the lesser of two evils.

Life entails risk, and you have to draw some lines.

America is an incredibly polarized country politically. I think ANY Republican would start out with 42 percent of the vote.

Knowing the identity of the leaker helps you analyze the likelihood that the material is real.

I think politics is everything.

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right.

Politics is how you think about life itself.

It is a cliche, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain - from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.

The odd thing is that Trump's hand movements don't seem to coordinate with the topic at hand. Most pols manage to make their hand movements correspond with the message, so a slash will accompany emphasis, etc. Trump's got about three moves, the most notable of which is his "okay" gesture, making a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Anyway, Trump has only a few gestures, including that one, and to my eye he uses them seemingly indiscriminately. I've seen him use the "okay/f.u." sign to be pedantic.

I always love it when a small paper wins. When I was growing up in the Bronx, the editor of the Riverdale Press - a neighborhood rag - kept submitting his columns for a Pulitzer. We laughed and laughed at his ego. He finally won.

I think Hillary Clinton will make a fine president, and (most important) I am comfortable with her making gigantic, momentous decisions.

One thing I am learning from the kitten is that everything he is doing seems to be in preparation for murder.

You should support Israel not because it is Jewish but because it is a sane, secular democracy. You want Lebanon to be at peace. You don't care much about Kuwait.

Donald Trump is a boor, and cannot stop being a boor.

You know, I am not a particular Kennedy apologist or an awed fan - I was 12 when he was murdered - but I have discussed Kennedy with historians. For his incredibly short tenure, he was a very important president. Many put him in the second tier, below the big three and surrounded by Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy moved our soul. Changed our thinking about service and governance. And won big in the greatest nuclear crisis of the Cold War.

The advent of DNA testing, and the number of convictions thrown out, has confirmed that we've put LOTS of innocent people to death. There need not be any other argument against death penalty.

Trump cannot change because in his mind, he has ALWAYS been rewarded for his boorish, stupid, arrogant behavior.

Shakespeare was such a splendid vulgarian.

An editorial writer might consult a reporter to see what she thinks, if it is what she covers. But they are entirely independent.

The horrifying thing is that nearly half of America seems in synch with xenophobia and race-baiting.

We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.

Donald Trump's humor is hostile to a fault.

I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.

It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has attracted white supremacists.

Hillary Clinton rubs people the wrong way, for valid reasons.

Donald Trump is way worse than George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a fundamentally decent man of limited intelligence who surrounded himself with awful people who dragged him in terrible directions. He was a bad president. But he was not actively malign, in the sense that he did what he thought was right. I don't think this guy cares what's right. I think he's in it for self-aggrandizement, for profit, and for power.

I think Marco Rubio could never have recovered from revealing himself to be pathetic.

I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.

I am perhaps being charitable but I think there are a bunch of people out there who feel stupid. Some will be feeling stupid for stupid and evil reasons - HEY, TRUMP HASN'T DEPORTED ALL THE BROWN PEOPLE YET - and some will feel stupid for good reasons, such as that he lied about everything. But I think being made to feel stupid is damage.

I disagree with those who suggest that we permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it can kill you. That is sheer hysteria. I think we should permanently close down the U.S. mail on the grounds that it has been making us sick for quite a while.

Every single fat comic uses his weight as a punchline. There is something sad about that.

I don't think I could ever love someone with whom I fundamentally disagreed, politically.

I think there are a good many Donald Trump voters who are sick of government as it is practiced in America and genuinely want to blow up the system and see what happens. They are stupid - or at least unwise - but not necessarily racist.

I believe the publisher is a member of the editorial board, and I think his vote would matter.

I think Trump is simply inept, incapable of rescuing himself.

Making stuff up is the worst thing a journalist can do. Plagiarizing is the second worst.

The verb "Garland" should be created. It would mean to unfairly put a stinking albatross around someone's neck, to make him unemployable.

Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.

It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

It doesn't entirely make sense that if 51 senators are from one party, and they can stick together, they can do whatever they want. Especially in this age of blatant, shameless gerrymandering.

Editorials are editorials. They a supposed to have an opinion, even a very strong one.

We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.

Johnny Hart became much less funny after he found sobriety, and religion, around the same time.

Reporters are not merely recording devices that take down what people say and repeat it in print; we are expected to use our knowledge and experience both for triage - deciding what's important to cover and what isn't - and for contextualizing, analyzing and such.

I like to eat alone in restaurants, with a book, particularly if I am out of town, alone, on business. It's relaxing. I feel not even a twinge of embarrassment. Is this gender-related? Is there a lingering feeling among women that if they are alone in public, they will be judged to be spinsters or spinsters-to-be?

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It's the most common question, but it's also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline.

Peggy Noonan is not as good a columnist as my colleague Kathleen Parker, in my opinion, but they share something related to their Pulitzers. Kathleen won in in 2010. They won it for a similar reason. They broke from their crowd, and sprinted away. They delivered the politically unexpected take, at some peril to their readership.

The total wall is between editorial and newsroom. And unbreachable barrier. For good reason. It doesn't mean the two sides don't talk.