Warhol really did say this, in the first person: “We go to openings of envelopes, openings of books — which are better — and closings of doors,” quoted in Melvin Maddocks’s column “Cold showers and parties,” The Christian Science Monitor, 18 August 1977. What he did not do is invent the joke — the earliest version Quote Investigator can find ↗ is Broadway columnist Jack O’Brian’s barb at actress Sylvia Miles, printed in January 1974.
“We go to openings of envelopes” Andy Warhol, quoted by Melvin Maddocks in “Cold showers and parties,” The Christian Science Monitor, 18 August 1977, p. 26. Warhol said the line, but did not coin the joke: the earliest documented version is Jack O’Brian’s barb at actress Sylvia Miles in The Jersey Journal, 23 January 1974. · Verbatim: “We go to openings of envelopes, openings of books — which are better — and closings of doors.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Andy Warhol — American pop artist, filmmaker & co-founder of Interview magazine. Theme: "We go to openings of envelopes". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The column that records it
Source
“Cold showers and parties”
Published
The Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 18 August 1977, p. 26, col. 3
Reported by
Melvin Maddocks, Monitor columnist 1946–1989
Joke’s origin
Jack O’Brian, “The Voice of Broadway,” The Jersey Journal, 23 January 1974
I never go out alone. I am always surrounded by my entourage at any party. We go to openings of envelopes, openings of books — which are better — and closings of doors. That is to say, we go out a lot. But I still don’t understand or believe in parties.
Quoted in print, 1977
Maddocks introduced the passage as “the reasonably wise and certainly desperate words of a premier party-goer, Andy Warhol.” Transcribed from the Monitor column by Quote Investigator ↗, which verified it via ProQuest; the 1977 Monitor is not freely readable online.
23 January 1974 — the earliest version Quote Investigator locates ↗ runs in Jack O’Brian’s Broadway column in The Jersey Journal, aimed at Sylvia Miles: “last week the madcap mummer attended half a dozen openings, including one envelope, two appendectomies and a cellar door.”
June 1975 — the puppeteer Wayland Flowers reduces it to the portable form, in Earl Wilson’s syndicated column, collected by Barry Popik ↗: “Of gadabout Sylvia Miles: ‘She’d go to the opening of an envelope.’” By that October Wilson reported Miles had begun to like it.
18 August 1977 — Warhol takes the joke over in the first person in Melvin Maddocks’s Monitor column: “We go to openings of envelopes, openings of books — which are better — and closings of doors” (citation and full passage ↗).
23 February 1987 — the day after Warhol’s death, Newsday recalls him still playing with it: “Everyone says I’d go to the opening of an envelope. Well, last night I went to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf’s. That’s almost as good as an envelope” (via Quote Investigator ↗).
The text that documents this line is a newspaper column first published on 18 August 1977, so it is squarely under US copyright — nothing here is public domain. Warhol’s spoken words and his own published books are equally modern; short quotation with full attribution, as on this page, is the appropriate use.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What people get wrong
Warhol genuinely spoke the words quoted above — and he is still the wrong answer to the question people usually mean, which is who coined the envelope joke. The two facts get collapsed constantly.
The line most often pinned on Warhol is the third-person taunt — “She’d go to the opening of an envelope” — which Quote Investigator traces ↗ to the puppeteer Wayland Flowers, about Sylvia Miles, in Earl Wilson’s column in June 1975. Warhol’s own documented version is first-person and longer: “We go to openings of envelopes, openings of books — which are better — and closings of doors.”
✕
Later reuseOlivia Goldsmith, Buddy Cianci and others reassigned
The gag kept being re-pointed at whoever was currently over-exposed. Michelle Lovric’s Women’s Wicked Wisdom (2004) gives Olivia Goldsmith on Ivana Trump — “she shows up to the opening of an envelope” — and Quote Investigator records ↗ earlier variants swapping in Bob Hope, Cesar Romero and Michael York.
✓Warhol did say “We go to openings of envelopes” — in The Christian Science Monitor of 18 August 1977. He was riffing on a joke that, on the earliest evidence located by Quote Investigator ↗, Jack O’Brian had aimed at Sylvia Miles in January 1974 and Wayland Flowers had made famous by 1975.
Context
Why the joke stuck to him
It was never about Warhol first. In January 1974 the Broadway columnist Jack O’Brian aimed an early, baroque version at the actress Sylvia Miles — who had starred in Warhol’s own film Heat (1972) — writing that she had lately attended “half a dozen openings, including one envelope, two appendectomies and a cellar door.” The puppeteer Wayland Flowers sanded it down to the version everyone remembers, and by the summer of 1975 Earl Wilson was running it in syndication: “She’d go to the opening of an envelope.”
Warhol’s move, in August 1977, was to take a joke about a compulsive party-goer and say it in the first person — and then keep going, past envelopes to book launches and the closing of doors. He never dropped it. In the Newsday piece that ran the day after his death, he is remembered saying he had just been to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf’s, which was “almost as good as an envelope.”
“Everyone says I’d go to the opening of an envelope. Well, last night I went to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf’s.”
What happened to the line afterwards
The joke outlived everyone in it. By 2004 it had been recycled for a new set of names — Michelle Lovric’s Women’s Wicked Wisdom gives Olivia Goldsmith on Ivana Trump: “she shows up to the opening of an envelope” — and it became a standard weapon against publicity-hungry politicians, most famously the Providence mayor Buddy Cianci.
It has since stopped being a quotation at all. Wiktionary now lists ↗ “opening of an envelope” as a plain English idiom: any event that might contribute to one’s self-promotion. That drift is exactly why the coinage keeps getting handed to the most famous name in the story.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1928–1987 · American pop artist, filmmaker & co-founder of Interview magazine
Warhol turned soup cans, silkscreened Marilyns and disaster photographs into the defining images of American Pop art, then treated publicity itself as a medium — the Factory, the films, and Interview magazine, which he co-founded with John Wilcock in the autumn of 1969. Born in Pittsburgh on 6 August 1928, he was by the mid-1970s a fixture of the New York party circuit; Maddocks introduced him in the 1977 column as “a premier party-goer.” He died on 22 February 1987.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary attestation
Melvin Maddocks, “Cold showers and parties,” The Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 18 August 1977, quote page 26, column 3 — transcribed and cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: We Attend the Openings of Envelopes,” 3 November 2019. Earliest version of the underlying joke: Jack O’Brian, “The Voice of Broadway,” The Jersey Journal, 23 January 1974, quote page 30.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We go to openings of envelopes’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-go-to-openings-of-envelopes/