“Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.”
Attributed
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Walter Winchell 4
American gossip journalist 1897–1972Related quotes
Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), I
“The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.”
Criticism (1893).
“It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.”
Source: Godric (1980)
“History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.”
Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s
Context: Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
“A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.”
'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 405
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s
“There is no time to leave important words unsaid.”
“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.”
Misattributed
Source: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen (1898), p. 370 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435065322687?urlappend=%3Bseq=458: "If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie." Other versions of the saying were repeated in several of Hubbard's later writings.
