On Andy Warhol’s Birthday, the Best Zingers From His Diaries

Andy Warhol was known for being the quieter one at parties—the one who chose to orchestrate the madness at, say, Studio 54, rather than truly participate in it—but the artist and man about town, who would have turned 89 today, still undeniably had a way with words, and not just when it comes to brief but unforgettable phrases like “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Just take the fact that though he died decades before Donald Trump became president, he still managed to squeeze in some particularly salty words about Trump, who was in fact obsessed with the artist, and who in turn, Warhol called “cheap” and “a butch guy.”

Those words came from some ’80s entries of The Andy Warhol Diaries, a collection published posthumously, in 1989, by Warhol’s friend and collaborator, the writer Pat Hackett. (Starting in the mid-’70s, the pair would talk on the phone about Warhol’s days, which Hackett, would dutifully record what Warhol quipped on a legal pad.) But there’s another source for getting to know Warhol, the pundit: a variety of Twitter accounts, the most notable being @WarholsDiary, aka “Andy Lives,” which since 2011 has been excerpting and regularly tweeting out quotes from his diaries as if the artist actually had a Twitter account. (Which he definitely would have, knowing how much he loved fame and showing off his famous pals.)

The quotes are particularly illuminating; the account’s first, timeliest lesson is what not to have gotten Warhol for his birthday—and good thing the late designer Halston also isn’t around these days to read this, though it does also seem like the pair had a lot of fun:

That’s hardly the only one of Warhol’s zingers, which he seemed to have been itching to dispense—despite another of his famous quotes, “I think everybody should be nice to everybody”:

There are, however, some kind words squeezed in there, too:

As well as one of today’s primary uses of social media: to complain:

It’s not too hard to imagine that last one coming out of the mouth of Jared Leto, who’s reportedly set to play Warhol in his upcoming biopic.

Related: A Brief History of Donald Trump’s Unrequited Love of Andy Warhol, Who Called Him “Cheap”

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