Art & Creativity Quote by Oscar Levant

Levant’s line lands like a perfectly timed rimshot: self-absorption framed as self-preservation, culture treated as an unwanted interruption. The joke isn’t just that he’s vain. It’s that he’s honest about the kind of vanity modern life quietly rewards: the obsession with one’s own inner weather, curated and monitored as if it were a full-time job. Reading, traditionally sold as moral self-improvement, becomes here a threat to the main project - the self as constant spectacle.

The phrasing does the heavy lifting. “Given up” mimics the language of virtuous renunciation (smoking, drinking), but what he renounces is a virtue itself. Then the kicker: books “take my mind off myself.” It’s an inversion of the therapeutic promise that books are escape; Levant treats escape as the problem. Underneath the quip is a bleakly comic portrait of a mind that can’t tolerate quiet displacement, that refuses the humility of entering someone else’s consciousness.

Context matters: Levant was a composer and a famously mordant public persona, a performer whose neuroses were part of the act and, arguably, part of the survival strategy in a mid-century entertainment machine. The quote reads like a defensive joke from someone who knows that introspection can be both a brand and a prison. It’s funny because it’s too true: attention is finite, and he’s admitting - with showbiz bravado - where he’s chosen to spend it.