Brendan Gill

Brendan Gill (4 October 1914 – 27 December 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.

Quotes

 * In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skycrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniatures Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.
 * 1982, quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: New York's hidden rooftop world (1990) foreword, also quoted in Dictionary of Quotations, p. 355 (2005)
 * He stared the assorted meannesses and failed promises of American life straight in the face, and they stared back.
 * 1990, On Walker Evan's photographs for James Agee's book on the destitute South. A New York Life, also quoted in Dictionary of Quotations, p. 355 (2005)

"not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious"