Design for Living Quotes

“Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“ERNEST FRIEDLANDER: Be quiet! Be quiet!

LEO MERCURÉ: Why should we be quiet? You’re making enough row to blast the roof off! Why should you have the monopoly of noise? Why should your pompous moral pretensions be allowed to hurdle across the city without any competition? We’ve all got lungs. Let’s use them! Let’s shriek like mad! Let’s enjoy ourselves!”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“It's inevitable that the more successful I become, the more people will run after me. I don't believe in their friendship, and I don't take them seriously, but I enjoy them. Probably a damn sight more than they enjoy me! I enjoy the whole thing. I've worked hard for it all my life. Let them all come! They'll drop me, all right, when they're tired of me; but maybe I shall get tired first.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“Otto: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I've heard is
correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-
leaved shamrock.

Gilda: That's Ireland, dear.

Otto: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“LEO MERCURÉ: The Daily Express says (the play)’s disgusting.

GILDA: We should be cut to the quick if it said anything else.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living