Rich Cohen Quotes & Sayings

The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement. — Rich Cohen

Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in. — Rich Cohen

The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too. — Rich Cohen

When a movie star sits and talks to you, it's almost always, and only, because she's promoting something. — Rich Cohen

I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice - in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion. — Rich Cohen

With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center. — Rich Cohen

The Toothbrush mustache was first introduced in Germany by Americans, who turned up with it at the end of the 19th century the way Americans would turn up with ducktails in the 1950s. It was a bit of modern efficiency, an answer to the ornate mustaches of Europe - pop effluvia that fell into the grip of a bad, bad man. — Rich Cohen

The person who should really write an appreciation of the late great Dom DeLuise is Burt Reynolds, who, even more than Mel Brooks, made of the jolly, beanie wearing fat man a side-kick and a legend. — Rich Cohen

If you are money, then, when you die, you will be spent. — Rich Cohen

When facing terrorism, especially in the wake of awful events, there is a tendency to despair, to see in the battle a problem without a solution. — Rich Cohen

Most mustaches lie waiting for some Clark Gable or Tom Selleck to fix them in the mind. The greatest are identified with a single man, a bad man, usually, who so wrapped his identity with a particular configuration of facial hair that the two became inseparable. — Rich Cohen

The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents' house, Abe [Reles] had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong--America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bit of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force. — Rich Cohen

It's a challenge, writing about actors, especially a good actor, because you can't always tell when they're being honest and when they're pretending - that is, when they're acting. The really good ones don't always seem to know themselves. — Rich Cohen

Some women can't stand being pregnant, getting big and bloated, and hauling around a giant stomach, and some women, for reasons probably understood by Darwin, love it. — Rich Cohen