No battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.
Said the caption on a photograph of the USS Arizona in the program for the 1941 Army-Navy football game — eight days before Pearl Harbor.
Ovid’s banishment from Rome by Augustus — which meant that his books were automatically removed from the city’s libraries as well.
The similar banning of Virgil’s and Livy’s three decades later — by Caligula, who simply did not like them.
May the devil bung a cesspool with his skull.
Requested John Millington Synge, re a dim-witted reviewer.
One of us was once in love for eight days with a woman of fairly easy virtue, and the other for three days with a ten-franc whore. Altogether, eleven days of love between the two of us.
Being Edmond and Jules Goncourt, elucidating their relationships with the opposite sex.
Longfellow published his first poem at thirteen.
Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at seventeen — and after publication several years later was to hear it called a hoax.
No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses, insisted Richard Henry Dana.
Never having realized that there originally once was an actual troublemaking Irish family named Hooligan.
Or a military officer named Shrapnel.
The John Cage composition entitled 4’33”.
In which the performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds — and plays nothing.
Cervantes was fifty-eight when Part I of Don Quixote was published.
And sixty-eight at Part II.
Finding the earliest hints of a theory of evolution in Anaximander.
In the sixth century BC.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
Said Kurt Vonnegut.
Has Novelist ever known many who could not contrive some way to keep the pot boiling during fallow stretches?
General Mikhail T. Kalashnikov.
Joseph Ignace Guillotin.
Sir Rudolf Bing was once robbed of a cheap watch he wore only for sentimental reasons. Zinka Milanov was infuriated:
The General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not display a twenty-dollar wristwatch!
The mugging in which Giuseppe di Stefano, at eighty-three, was quite badly injured — while being stripped of a gold chain he had been given by Maria Callas.
It was Beckett’s wife who took the call informing them that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize. Her first reaction, even as she turned to tell him:
Quelle catastrophe!
Toledo, Judah Halevi was born in.
Córdoba, Maimonides.
Saint Benedict, essentially the founder of moderate monastic rule.
Whose earliest regulations as an abbot were so harsh that the monks tried to poison his wine.
In the dense mist
What is being shouted
Between hill and boat?
Beethoven’s brief period as a pupil of Hadyn’s:
I never learned anything from the man.
There is no such thing as abstract art, said Picasso.
You always have to start somewhere or other.
Inconceivable nonsense.
Tchaikovsky called Das Rheingold.
Machiavelli’s interminable visits to prostitutes — described in unexpurgated detail in his correspondence.
Graham Greene’s — so compulsive that a biographer was able to reproduce a cryptic list, in Greene’s handwriting, of a favorite forty-seven.
Georges Simenon’s — whose autobiography speaks of as many as a thousand.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Says a Flaubert letter.
Yeats evidently knew no music.
The word serendipity.
Coined by Horace Walpole, in a 1754 fairy story.
August 22, 1904, Kate Chopin died on.
August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
George Eliot’s instantaneous anger over any sort of anti-Semitic reference or joke.
Molière was on stage, performing in the role of the hypochondriac in his own last play Le Malade imaginaire, when he was stricken by the bursting blood vessel that caused his death a day later.
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Quoth Ingmar Bergman.
Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.
When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow — is it always the book?
Asked Lichtenberg.
Owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs.
Milton labeled critics.
Ménière’s disease, Swift suffered from.
Erysipelas, Herman Melville.
Chopin’s phthisis — which left him weighing less than one hundred pounds.
They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie — I am not ague-proof.
Realizes Lear.
The central railway-station platform of destinies.
Blaise Cendrars called early twentieth-century Bohemian Paris.
Virginia Woolf’s suicide, for which she filled her pockets with stones before walking into the Ouse.
Wondering if anyone has ever noted how many stones — and what they might possibly have weighed?
Sleet falling;
Fathomless, infinite
Loneliness.
Verlaine was at most eight or nine feet away when he famously fired three shots at Rimbaud with a revolver — fortunately no more than wounding him in the wrist with the first and missing completely with the next two.
The painter of painters.
Manet called Velazquez.
A German equivalent of Tubby, Schubert’s nickname was, among his friends.
Not to be born is far best.
Wrote Sophocles.
Not to be born at all would be the best thing.
Wrote Theognis, at least a half-century earlier.
Richard Feynman’s conviction that as the perspective grows more and more distant, James Clerk Maxwell will loom ever larger as the single towering eminence of the nineteenth century.
The one truly great political figure of our age.
Einstein called Gandhi.
Dostoievsky’s graduation from an engineering institute.
Achieved only after having first failed elementary algebra.
A cobbler makes a greater contribution to society than does a Homer or a Plato.
Asserted Proudhon.
Katherine Mansfield was dead at thirty-five.
March 7, 1944, Emmanuel Ringelbaum died on.
Ballplayers on the road live together. It won’t work.
Said Rogers Hornsby re the signing of Jackie Robinson.
I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!
Said Chekhov, late along.
Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first dramatic version of the Don Juan legend — in which he allows someone to ask the stone Commendatore if there are taverns in the underworld.
And can poets down there still win prizes?
John Ruskin’s insistence that he could never live in America — a country so miserable as to possess no castles, as he put it.
Freud’s addiction to cocaine.
Sherlock Holmes’.
Contemporary college students — college students — who when asked to identify Joan of Arc have supposed her to be a character in the Biblical story of Noah and the flood.
Or indeed Noah’s wife.
The first hospital in Europe was opened in Paris in the seventh century AD.
At least four hundred years after such things existed in Hindu India.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
America is now given ov
er to a damned mob of scribbling women.
Determined Hawthorne, in 1855.
The greatest achievement for a woman is to be as seldom as possible spoken of, said Thucydides.
Who mentions not one of them in his history.
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets — which mentions none either.
Yasser Arafat was reported not to have read one book in the last forty years of his life.
But to have spent innumerable hours enrapt by Tom and Jerry cartoons.
The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God.
Said Rumi.
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, John Cowper Powys died in.
By her own count, Vigée-Lebrun produced six hundred and sixty-two portraits.
Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.
Wrote Dickens.
Butterfly, my child.
Puccini spoke of her as.
William Faulkner. Seated on a park bench near City Hall in today’s Oxford, Mississippi — in bronze.
Thomas Eakins was once accused of incest with a sister.
And a niece.
Henry Roth acknowledged the same with a sister — and for over a period of years.
Contemplating several of Turner’s early watercolors, a prospective buyer implies that he has recently seen better.
Which has to mean you’ve been looking at Tom Girtin, Turner tells him.
Wondering if there can be any other ranking twentieth-century American poet whose body of work contains even half the percentage of pure drivel as Wallace Stevens’.
Novelist’s calendar, which he leafs through idly to verify something he already suspected — that he has been out to dinner a grand total of three times in the entire past year, and then only when taken by some book person with an expense account.
The unceasing preoccupation with marriageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.
Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.
Rarely remembering that the first translation from ancient Greek any of us learn to quote is of Pythagoras.
Kierkegaard’s mother had originally been the family maid, whom his father married after the death of an earlier wife. There is not one word about her in anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, his journals included.
Henry Fielding’s wife’s maid — whom he likewise married after the wife’s death.
Rembrandt’s — who became his mistress.
Handel spent almost fifty years in London — and to the end spoke only broken English.
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the et cetera.
Hideous, Hume condemned much of Spinoza as.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Said Voltaire — describing opera.
Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.
Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.
Not to add that he keeps his hair slick with water instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease — unquote, additionally.
And so to Mrs. Martin and there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward.
Reads an entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary for early June, 1666.
An earlier tenant in the same London building where Sylvia Plath would commit suicide — had been Yeats.
Pelion and Ossa. In Odyssey XI. In Georgics I. In Horace’s Odes III.
With small Latin and less Greek, Shakespeare found them for Hamlet where?
The thirteen extant letters of Plato.
Did Plato write any of the thirteen?
Gertrude Stein once delighted Picasso by reporting that a collector had been dumbfounded, years afterward, to hear that Picasso had given her her portrait as a gift, rather than asking payment.
Not understanding that that early in Picasso’s career, the difference had been next to negligible.
I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.
Said Samuel Goldwyn.
One author pilfers the best of another.
And calls it tradition.
Says a fragment of Bacchylides, ca. 450 BC.
Brooklyn, Leonard Bernstein is buried in.
February 22, 1913, Saussure died on.
Too lazy to copy down passages he thought he might later wish to quote, De Quincey often simply ripped them out of the book at hand.
Even when the book was someone else’s.
A photo of Lillie Langtry, as Rosalind in As You Like It, taken in 1882.
How can Novelist have fallen in love with someone dead since 1929?
Henry James, addressing Joseph Conrad: Mon cher confrère.
Conrad, addressing James: Mon cher maître.
Both, repeatedly, when in conversation, said Ford Madox Ford.
More than fifty relatives of Bach, whose names remain on record, were musicians.
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Guy Davenport’s account of a lunch with Thomas Merton — at which Merton devoured six martinis.
Spinach, fruit, water.
Having been Mahler’s unvarying diet.
Ethiopians have black sperm, believed Herodotus.
A sort of gutless Kipling.
Orwell called Auden.
Ernest Poole. Margaret Wilson. Julia M. Peterkin. Margaret Ayer Barnes. T. S. Stribling.
Being five of the first fifteen winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Caroline Miller. Josephine W. Johnson. Harold L. Davis.
Being the next three.
Ted Hughes’s father was one of only seventeen survivors from an entire regiment annihilated at Gallipoli.
No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more.
Said Seamus Heaney at the 1998 funeral of Hughes himself.
I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.
Says someone in Congreve’s The Way of the World.
I’m going. I find the company very uncongenital.
Says someone in a Gypsy Rose Lee mystery.
He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire — he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ’s College.
Being Milton, as reported by John Aubrey.
Paavo Nurmi died partially paralyzed.
Paavo Nurmi.
The French government provides the Paris Opera a subsidy of roughly $135,000,000 each year.
The United States gives the Metropolitan Opera less than $1,000,000.
At eighteen, John Stuart Mill spent several nights in jail for having distributed birth control pamphlets in a London slum.
Delmore Schwartz, in his disturbed final years, hearing voices — and insisting that they were directed at him from the spire of the Empire State Building.
The Book of Margery Kempe, evidently the first autobiography in English by a woman.
Surely the first to have been dictated — by an illiterate author.
Martin Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt — conducted in the main at a squalid hotel next to the Marburg railroad station.
Sainte-Beuve’s affair with Victor Hugo’s wife.
Teilhard de Chardin was forbidden by the Jesuits to publish any of his philosophical writings while he lived.
November 30, 1935, Fernando Pessoa died on.
Leuprolide acetate. Metoprolol. Hydrochlorothiazide. Atorva-statin. Aspirin. Salmeterol xinafoate. Flunisolide. Omeprazole. Loperamide hydrochloride. Simethicone. Calcium carbonate.
Or is Novelist forgetting one or two.
It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation.
Said Lytton Strachey of Virginia Woolf’s major novels.
Jeanne Eagels. As the original Sadie Thompson.
Irene Papas, as Antigone.
Irene Papas, as Helen.
Stainless ma
iden amid the stain of blood.
Lucretius calls Iphigenia.
You never hear of a novel-wright or a picture-wright or a poem-wright — why a playwright?
Asked W. S. Gilbert.
When the stove is clean enough I shall turn on the gas.
Wrote Anna Wickham — twelve years before she hanged herself instead.
Where the synecdoche of tessera made a totality, however illusive, the metonymy of kenosis breaks this up into discontinuous fragments.
Somewhere declareth Harold Bloom.
It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.
Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.
How many of you are there in the quartet?
The affecting ancient legend that when Pindar was a youngster, bees once coated his lips with honey while he slept.
Alprazolam.
Robert Pershing Doerr.
Pausing to remember that no fewer than eight characters in Hamlet — eight — die violently.
The Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.
Whose name the Nazis changed during the occupation because of her having been a Jew.
174517 —
Which Primo Levi could read tattooed on his left forearm from Auschwitz onward.
Light from the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of antiquity’s Seven Wonders, was visible from as far as twenty miles at sea.
Helmut Newton died in a car crash. At eighty-three.