A Quote by Alexander Woollcott

Babies in silk hats playing with dynamite. — © Alexander Woollcott
Babies in silk hats playing with dynamite.
He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn't someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool.
Twisting and wiring and stringing starching and curling, delicately painting spots and shadings on scraps of silk until what had been nothing more than a pile of brightly colored fragments had been transformed into the silk irises, forget-me-not, violets and roses that would adorn the hats of women and girls more fortunate than themselves.
I was 16 at the time, and I came backstage and started hanging out with them. I said, "Well, maybe you can 'vanish' the silk this way." The opening was a black stage while the "Magic to Do" song started playing. All you saw were hands, lit by Jules Fisher, and then Ben Vereen would appear beyond the hands, and at the end of the scene he would vanish a silk. The spotlight would hit a red spot on the floor where you'd see the silk on the floor. He'd pull the silk out of the floor and it became the entire set coming out of the floor.
A guy like Benoit, he's really good and a lot like Dynamite. Dynamite, just because he was the original, was the best. But, you know, Benoit now is by far better. Dynamite Kid is nothing now.
Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel.
When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life.
I knit for Caps for Good - a charity that gives hats to Third World babies - while I watch movies with friends.
So I wanted to show what I did with the money. So I got red silk shirts, beautiful hats, wonderful saddles, a great horse, and two gold teeth. So that was the way I did it.
When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.
Exaggerating?" Silk sounded shocked. "You don't mean to say that horses can actually lie, do you? Hettar shrugged. "Of course. They lie all the time. They're very good at it." For a moment Silk looked outraged at the thought, and then he suddenly laughed. "Somehow that restores my faith in the order of the universe," he declared. Wolf looked pained. "Silk," he said pointedly, "you're a very evil man. Did you know that?" "One does one's best," Silk replied mockingly.
The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
I've been creating work by silk-screening images of arms and legs and heads and objects on paper - like drawings of vegetables, guns, hats, whatever - and then also printing sheets of patterns, colorful polka dots and line drawing patterns.
As I look out at all of you gathered here, I want to say that I don't see a room full of Parisians in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses. I don't see bankers and housewives and store clerks. No. I address you all tonight as you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.
I wanted to make sure that my act was family friendly for tonight, but I don't have babies. So I thought that maybe I could pretend that I had babies and that way I could appeal to the people in the audience who have babies and to the people who like to pretend that they have babies.
By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time.
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