The key to immortality is boredom.
—Elisa Gabbert
There comes a tide in the affairs of men which, if you don't nip it in the bud, leads on to boredom.
—E. F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia
Boredom is an exquisite experience, to be savoured and analysed, like old brandy and sex.
—Barbara Pym, journal
I'm dejected, I’m bored, I’m blue. How can a man be more at home than that?
—Henry James, “A Light Man”
Always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
I’m bored, sad, miserable, unsuccessful in everything—everything is abhorrent.
—Tolstoy, letter, 1856
Sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
—The Rolling Stones, “Rocks Off”
Nightmares of boredom and melancholy oozed from him.
—Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies
Starchy with boredom and fatigued with sameness.
—Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one should afterwards forget it!
—Max Beerbohm, “The Pines”
People here get bored and concentrate on developing their habits.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
All of us are dedicated to becoming bores.
—Paul Valéry, Analects
Boring myself in an effort to drive boredom away.
—François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
The rebellion against boredom that makes the old so anarchic.
—Lawrence Osborne, Only to Sleep
This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man to be bored or to lie.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”
The excruciating boredom of exclusively male society.
—Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones
There is an enormous advantage to be gained from going to parties alone, particularly if one goes without a hat or coat. Upon entering the house and greeting the hostess with conventional gallantry one can give a quick glance round the room and size up the situation. The trained eye can tell at once if it promises to be a bore, and then while responding to the salutations of the guests with the required degree of affability one can work one’s way to the bathroom, climb out of the window and drive home.
—George Sanders, Memoirs of a Professional Cad
She always left early unless you gave her something to do, like talking to a bore, to make her feel useful.
—Mary McCarthy, The Group
They bored him, but when they went away from home he missed the boredom.
—Muriel Spark, The Bachelors
The bore never understands that if he would only shut up he would cease to be boring.
—Alice Thomas Ellis, The Summer House
A trained mind is one which never bores unintentionally.
—H. F. Heard, A Taste for Honey
I begin to regard myself as a sort of old bore I live with.
—T. H. White, diary, 1959
A bore of international repute whose dread presence could empty the room in any center of civilization.
—Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms
We were all experts in tedium and recognized a master.
—Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues
Her boringness was so perfect that it had transcended itself to become a kind of eccentricity.
—Michael Faber, The Book of Strange New Things
A vast capacity for imposing boredom, a sense of immensely powerful stuffiness, emanated from him.
—Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones
He was never particularly delighted or disappointed; his stories were always long and boring; and his jokes invariably provoked laughter just because they were not funny.
—Anton Chekhov, “Three Years”
The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring.
—Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Jenny began to think of money as the condition that made you boring.
—Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise
I expected powerful people to be boring; it comes from no one interrupting or arguing or telling them to shut up.
—Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another
Mrs. Blackwell’s disgusting cocktail party this afternoon—I don’t mean to be flip, but you wouldn't believe so many so famous people could be so dull.
—Janet Burroway, letter
The bored do not necessarily attract others of their kind.
—Anita Brookner, A Private View
One of the deadly attractions of people who are easily bored is the challenge of not boring them.
—Elizabeth Jane Howard, Something in Disguise
Her favorite thing about you is that you are unboreable.
—James Browning, The Fracking King
Ever since I could remember, my boredom threshold had been so high that it scarcely existed at all.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor
More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other cause.
—Robert Aickman, “The Same Dog”
Boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people’s faces.
—Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything
She’s not the only one who has believed the essential invocation of the American (and more specifically Californian) spirit is the bored, sexually mature teenager.
—Alice Bolin, Dead Girls
The meaningless topics pulled out of mental nowheres for discussion—like bets against boredom.
—Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century
I am padding this letter with all sorts of boring things.
—Frank O'Hara, letter to John Ashbery, 1957
Writing without an axe to grind is a boring business.
—Alice Thomas Ellis, The Cost of Letters
If the title is too boring to read all the way through, it might keep readers from trying the novel.
—Donald E. Westlake, introduction to Kahawa
A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
—Jenny Schuessler, New York Times
There are books that are at once excellent and boring.
—W. S. Maugham, notebook
I’m writing a book so boring . . . that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job.
—Geoff Dyer, to his publisher
I have read the reviews of Joy in the Morning with great interest. They are a good deal better than I expected but I note a rather sinister anti-Jeeves tone! The New Yorker frankly said he had become a bore.
—P. G. Wodehouse, letter, 1946
The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest.
—Virginia Woolf, diary, February 9, 1924
If a creative artist does not keep up to date with himself, he will bore himself and fall from creating to self-faking.
—Sylvia Townsend Warner, diary
It also dampens the spirit when you’re leading a heady life in the swim of things and you receive some boring little old-fashioned poem that reeks of the longueurs of the writer, whose time hangs heavy on her hands.
—Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.
—Wendy Cope, “Being Boring”