Art & Creativity Quote by Ethel Merman

Ethel Merman’s punchline lands because it weaponizes a confession most public figures are trained to launder: boredom. “I don’t like to read” isn’t just anti-intellectual bravado; it’s a carefully timed refusal of the cultured halo expected of celebrities, especially women, who were often pressured to sound tasteful, grateful, and edifying. Merman flips that script with a showbiz shrug. She doesn’t even bother with the respectable lie (“I’m too busy”); she goes straight for the supposedly trashy alternative: gossip columns.

The subtext is less “books are dumb” than “status games are dumber.” Gossip is social power in print: who’s up, who’s down, who’s faking it. For a Broadway star living inside the machinery of reputation, gossip isn’t mindless; it’s trade intelligence. The line also draws a boundary between performance and cultivation. Merman’s brand was volume, velocity, and unapologetic presence. The quote reads like the spoken equivalent of her famous belt: blunt, brassy, and engineered to get a laugh without asking permission.

Then she tightens the screw: “lots of pictures.” It’s a vaudevillian jab at the idea that reading equals virtue. Pictures signal immediacy, spectacle, the primacy of seeing over contemplating - a perfect credo for an entertainer whose job was to make the balcony feel something now. In an era when “seriousness” was a credential, Merman makes unseriousness a stance, and sells it like a hit.