John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:
Frankly, no.
Thomas Nashe was dead at thirty-one. Where, of what, or even exactly when, remains unknown.
Zapata was thirty-nine when he was murdered.
Stephen Dedalus, at Sandymount, in 1904.
Is he aware that Yeats was born there?
Trollope’s declaration that he wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him — so that he could be certain he had produced at least two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.
The measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him.
Wittgenstein once told someone.
Picasso’s admiration for Charlie Chaplin.
Diego Rivera’s.
Stalin’s.
As early as in Plutarch:
Let them who can do nothing better, teach.
Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.
And you, Madame, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.
The novels of Susan Sontag:
Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.
From a letter of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study:
Sometimes it seems to me that my very brain is on fire.
No further martinis after dinner, Conrad Aiken’s physician once commanded.
Following which Aiken frequently refused to eat until practically bedtime.
If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison.
Being Hitler — re artists he categorized as degenerate.
I shall fight as long as I live. And I shall not consider it more important to be alive than to be free.
Rang the first words of an oath taken by Athenians before battle.
The eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. Whose pulpit voice was so effective, said David Garrick, that he could make listeners laugh or cry by no more than pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.
Gertrude Stein’s Model T style, Elizabeth Hardwick called it.
There is one rule that can render your hand so light that the brush will float, says Cennino Cennini’s handbook for painters, ca. 1435:
Do not enjoy too much the company of women.
Every drop of sperm spilled is a masterpiece lost.
Said Piet Mondrian, five hundred years later.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw.
Piero della Francesca’s Nativity. In which Joseph has removed the saddle of an ass to use as a seat — while the ass itself brays in the background.
Erik Satie lived the entire later half of his life in extreme indigence.
Incredulity that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony — the Unfinished — was not once performed until thirty-seven years after his death.
Toasted Susie is my ice cream.
Pythagoras’s insistence that in one of his earlier incarnations he had fought in the Trojan War.
In fact that he had been Euphorbus, who in the Iliad wounds Patroclus and is in turn killed by Menelaus.
Borges’ vision of Paradise:
A kind of library.
The long-hoped-for opportunity to meet Byron that Schopenhauer turned away from at the last moment — when the woman he was with evinced far too much enthusiasm of her own about it.
Epi oinopa ponton.
Walter Scott’s novels generally cost him innumerable hours of hunting through reference books.
Which were forever heaped up precariously on the floor below his desk.
In addition to Italian, Leopardi possessed effortless mastery of Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, English, and Hebrew — by the age of sixteen.
October 21, 1969, Jack Kerouac died on.
Romain Rolland never learned which side won World War II.
Wondering how many lifetime scribes and/or manuscript copyists were put out of work in the decades immediately after Gutenberg?
Wondering why the plural of still life is still lifes and not still lives?
Sofa-size.
Simone Weil was dead at thirty-four.
You have reached Ned Klein. Please leave a message after the beep.
When I am eighty, my art may finally begin to cohere. By ninety, it may truly turn masterful.
Said Hokusai. At seventy-three.
Windy humbuggeries.
Mark Twain found in Scott.
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth-rate in Europe.
Faulkner once called Twain in turn.
The 2005 Vienna exhibition featuring erotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele — at which patrons arriving nude or in skimpy bathing suits were admitted free.
Colossal ennui. It seems to me that I could write something like it tomorrow by taking inspiration from the cat walking over the keyboard on my piano.
Said Prosper Mérimée of Tannhäuser.
It is impossible to finish any of his plays, they are pitiful.
Claimed Napoleon re Shakespeare.
A lot of twaddle.
Confirmed George III.
More than sixty percent of the people in the United States do not know what the capitalized word Holocaust in its common contemporary usage stands for.
Assuming that Saul Bellow was aware of the Moses Herzog mentioned in passing in Ulysses?
A desperate Stevie Smith addict.
Sylvia Plath called herself.
April 16, 1958, Rosalind Franklin died on.
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.
Declared a Utah senator named Orrin Hatch — presumably a former honors student in Logic 101.
Clov: What is there to keep me here?
Hamm: The dialogue.
The Girl of the Golden West, Act III — in which the soprano arrives on stage on horseback.
Renata Tebaldi was petrified.
One of the earliest translations of the Bible in America — into Mohawk.
At one juncture during his years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville was forced to take a cut in salary — from $4.00 to $3.60 per day.
Oscar Hammerstein’s first job in America, in a cigar factory, paid him two dollars a week.
Andrew Carnegie’s, in a cotton mill, had paid $1.50 — for twelve-hour days.
Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Edward Hopper died in.
Washington Square, in Greenwich Village, Novelist also happens to be typing this last book only short blocks away from.
Lorenzo de’ Medici, who commissioned Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485.
And a dozen or so years later sent Amerigo Vespucci sailing westward.
To cause justice to prevail in the land.
To prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.
To better the welfare of the people.
— Read portions of the Code of Hammurabi — from what may have been as early as 1800 BC.
Anthony Burgess’s bad eyesight.
Which permitted him to once enter a bank in Stratford-on-Avon — and order a drink.
Lloyd George knew my father,
Father knew Lloyd George.
In 1907, Caruso was being paid $2,000 per performance at the Metropolitan.
$2,000 in 1907 currency.
The uncanny sense of atmosphere in certain Constable landscapes.
So that looking at them could make one worry that he might need an umbrella, Fuseli said.
Remembering next to nothing about The Courtship of Miles Standish — except that Longfellow himself was in fact descended from Priscilla and John Alden.
Mozart wrote his Thirty-Sixth Symphony, the Linz, in at most three days.
In the period when artists of stature were called upon to paint likenesses of hunted murderers on the walls of
Florentine buildings, Andrea del Castagno’s led to so many captures that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati — Andrea of the Hanged.
Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.
Roger Fry said.
January 11, 1966, Giacometti died on.
The Marquis de Sade was at least once arrested for sodomy. And once for severely beating a young woman.
While also being implicated in the deaths of two prostitutes after an overdose of aphrodisiacs during an orgy.
Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?
We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it’s been.
Said Wayne Gretzky.
Ivy Compton-Burnett died after a bronchitis attack.
Martin Luther King’s seminary studies — during which he received a grade of C in public speaking.
A street in Nice is named after Marie Bashkirtseff.
Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Said Rebecca West.
He started off writing very well, then you can see his going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.
Added Evelyn Waugh.
Very dirty and completely worthless.
Edith Sitwell called Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Wholly ignorant.
Waugh called Sitwell.
Wonderful, this death.
Allegedly said William Etty, as it occurred.
Oliver Goldsmith was the oldest member of his graduating class at Trinity College, Dublin.
And the lowest ranked.
Proust, in the equivalent of basic training during his one year of military service at eighteen, was ranked seventy-third in a platoon of seventy-four.
An incomparable painting by Apelles, which Augustus brought from Cos to Rome, where it was slightly damaged.
And where not one contemporary Roman artist had the confidence to attempt to restore it.
Auden’s notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.
But Henry James, never.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.
Concluded Kelvin. In 1900.
I would go to considerable expense and inconvenience to avoid his company.
Quoth John Cheever — re John Updike.
Euripides’ father may have been a tavern-keeper.
Still curious all these years later as to why Faulkner would have given two of his major characters names then current in widely syndicated comic strips.
Though for that matter he gave three others the names of buildings on the University of Mississippi campus.
A passage in Montaigne where he speaks of himself as being well on the road to old age — having long since passed forty.
Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of forty-two.
Writes Daisy Ashford.
Anacreon, so highly acclaimed as a poet that the Athenians placed a statue of him on the Acropolis.
And so well known for other proclivities that Pausanias says the statue showed him drunk.
November 30, 1943, Etty Hillesum died on.
I become insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drink, God only knows how often or how much.
Wrote Poe to a friend.
Reading a book in translation:
Like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side turned out, said Cervantes.
Traduttore, traditore — translator, traitor, the Italian has it.
Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, his full name was.
Frank Raymond Leavis.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
A century before Alcoholics Anonymous, something called the Sons of Temperance, Poe did make a stab at. To no avail.
Inscribed on a painting by Jacob Jordaens:
Nihil similius insano quam ebrius — Nothing is more similar to a lunatic than a drunkard.
According to Liszt, Chopin had blue eyes.
According to everyone else they were brown.
The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.
Wrote Rousseau.
Catherine the Great died after having suffered a stroke and fallen from a commode in the royal water closet.
Eric Andrews here. Well, actually not here. But I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please wait for the signal.
Giuseppe Ungaretti’s father was a construction worker on the Suez Canal.
The Homeric combat between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal at a 1977 cocktail party —
In which Mailer threw a drink into Vidal’s face — and Vidal bit Mailer on the finger.
Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, near Bristol, J. K. Rowling was born at.
Rilke’s over-sentimentalizing of the poor.
Did he ever once sit shivering in an attic? Kurt Tucholsky asked.
Why did Harper Lee never write another novel?
First, check the acoustics. Then make sure you know where the fire axe is.
Being Charles Mingus — offering advice re performing in unfamiliar basement jazz clubs.
Intellectual — hen-pecked you all.
Being Byron — reaching about as far as possible for a rhyme in Don Juan.
So exhaustive was Raphael’s study of ancient sculpture in Rome that the city itself named him Keeper of Inscriptions and Remains.
Prokofiev was fifteen years older than Shostakovich.
The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West — near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Warren Spahn died in.
Because of having lived openly with George Henry Lewes, who was married, George Eliot was denied burial in Westminster Abbey.
I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
The last time anyone mentioned James Jones.
March 22, 1417, Nicolas Flamel died on.
In 1760, one year after Handel’s death, a biography by a Reverend John Mainwaring.
Apparently the first ever written of a composer.
Like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
Says an Anthony Powell character about growing old.
Toscanini’s seven-year affair with Geraldine Farrar — which he ended only when Farrar finally insisted that he leave his wife.
Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.
Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.
The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.
Said François Mauriac.
Being reminded that Fermat was a magistrate — for whom mathematics was fundamentally a hobby.
I am half sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Shalott.
Tirra lirra, by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?
Alessandro Manzoni spent five years on the first two drafts of I Promessi Sposi — and twelve more on the final version.
Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body and also because laundry was expensive.
Readily read?
A drawing by Rubens, in Rotterdam, of Achilles driving his spear into Hector’s throat — with his left hand.
When Homer specifically describes him as using his right.
The Trojan War will not take place, Cassandra!
I will make you a bet on that, Andromache.
— Rea
ds an exchange in Tiger at the Gates.
I just pretend.
Explained Laurence Olivier.
A pale, gentle, frightened little man.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife described a not yet middle-aged Thomas Hardy as.
Berlioz read every Fenimore Cooper novel as quickly as it appeared.
And admitted that fully four hours after he finished The Prairie he was still weeping over the death of Natty Bumppo.
The classic orator Hyperides, who divided his time between homes in Athens, Piraeus, and Eleusis.
Depending upon which of his mistresses he felt like visiting.
Georges Simenon’s affair with Josephine Baker.
Chardin died at eighty — without ever once in his life having ventured farther away from Paris than the forty miles to Fontainebleau.
Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.
Johnson told Boswell.
Chingachgook —
Pronounced Chicago, I think, said Mark Twain.
Altogether impoverished in his early years in Paris, for a time Juan Gris did not even possess a bed — and slept on newspapers.
Kees van Dongen’s admission that there were occasions during his own early Montmartre years when he was forced to filch milk and/or bread from neighborhood doorsteps — with an accomplice named Picasso.
Let there be Maecenases and there will be no lack of Virgils.
Said Martial.
Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it — that’s all right.