Skip to main content

Frank Harris Quotes

Here are collected some of my favourite quotes by and about Frank Harris.

"Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings"
- Frank Harris, quoted by Tobin and Gertz

"Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction"
- Frank Harris, quoted by Hesketh Pearson.

"Sex is the gateway to life."
- Frank Harris

There was a young lady of Paris
Whom nothing could ever embarrass
Until one fine day
In a sidewalk café
She abruptly ran into Frank Harris

- Anonymous (limerick quoted in a posting to a Dutch newsgroup)

"There is a destiny that shapes our ends rough, hew them as we will."
- Frank Harris

"Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humour in him."
- Bernard Shaw, from the preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

Frank Harris said "The fact is, Mr. Balfour, all the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism." Christianity, of course, but why journalism?
-
Arthur Balfour (1848-1930)

"Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind."
- Frank Harris

Harris really thought he was wonderful. Once he told me he was going to live to be a hundred. When I asked him what the formula was, he told me it was very simple. He said: "I've bought myself a stomach pump and one half hour after dinner I pump myself out." Can you imagine that? Well, it didn't work. It's a wonder it didn't kill him sooner.
- James Thurber on Frank Harris

"No, my dear Duke, I know nothing about the joys of homosexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that...And yet, if Shakespeare had asked me I would have had to submit."
- Harris, in conversation with the Duc de Richelieu, as reported by
Hugh Kingsmill .
Max Beerbohm illustrated this with a cartoon of Harris standing naked by the sea while Shakespeare 'gazes in anguish upon his awful mate'.

"Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - once"
- Oscar Wilde.

"He is neither first rate, nor second rate, nor tenth rate. He is just his horrible unique self."
-
George Bernard Shaw .

"He has no feelings. It is the secret of his success"
-
Oscar Wilde .

"Christ goes deeper than I do, but I have had a wider experience"
- Frank Harris, quoted by Hugh Kingsmill

"Can there ever have been, since St. Paul, such a pompous, conceited, opinionated, patronizing ass? Patronizing Ruskin, Carlyle, Whitman, Wilde, and the Prince of Wales; patronizing the Parthenon or the whole continent of North America; patronizing the arts, patronizing philosophy, patronizing God. Prose stodgy and repetitious; moralizing at once trite and windy; and as for the celebrated sex, orgasms going off as noisily and monotonously as a twenty-one gun salute - to Frank Harris, of course. "
- Simon Raven

Comments