Haller even then complains of junk mail.
Kurt Weill’s father was a cantor.
James Levine’s grandfather was one.
They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me.
Said Dryden’s sometime collaborator Nathaniel Lee, upon being confined to Bedlam.
Titian might have become an even greater painter if he had ever really learned elementary draftsmanship i.e., if he had ever really learned to draw.
Michelangelo evidently suggested.
Ellen Terry once refused the lead in a play Henry James had written particularly with her in mind.
James called her a hag.
Pliny the Younger’s detail-by-detail letter of 79 AD to Tacitus about the death of his uncle in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii.
The claim that Vicente Huidobro’s mother could trace her ancestry back to El Cid.
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
Begins Malone Dies.
Two of Jane Austen’s brothers became admirals in the Royal Navy.
Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.
The Persistence of Memory.
Itzhak Perlman. Nigel Kennedy. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. Midori. Shlomo Mintz.
Who all studied under Dorothy DeLay.
An appointment with E. M. Forster that Tennessee Williams once canceled.
Because he could not abide old men with urine stains on their trousers, Gore Vidal said Williams said.
Nabokov once dismissed Don Quixote as overrated during a lecture at Harvard.
Harvard thinks otherwise, he was complacently informed by Harry Levin.
Michael Praetorius.
Simone Signoret.
They are hardly more obscure than Hegel or Swedenborg. Said Nerval, refusing to explain the meaning of some sonnets.
The possibility that Phidias died in jail.
Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.
Nazim Hikmet was buried in Moscow. Thirty-eight years later a tree from Turkey was transplanted beside his grave.
Not long after Byron’s death, Teresa Guiccioli had an affair with Lamartine.
Was E. T. A. Hoffmann the first writer to use the word Philistine in its modern cultural sense?
What might Johannes Kepler have been allergic to, that his nose ran eternally?
Remembering that Bedlam is a contraction of Bethlehem, from London’s Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, since approximately 1400 an asylum.
Where in the eighteenth century tours were conducted — to view the chained inmates.
Only three former baseball players appeared at Ty Cobb’s funeral.
Litheck, Dietrich Buxtehude died in.
Josephine Baker’s mother was an East St. Louis washerwoman.
Omar Khayyám. Which translates as Omar the Tentmaker.
Though in fact he was a mathematician and astronomer.
Saint-Rémy.
Perhaps the greatest woman poet since Sappho, Harriet Monroe called Edna Millay.
I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning, acknowledged Hart Crane.
I can only say I do not greatly care for Madame Browning.
Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were once apartment mates.
Rubáiyát. Which itself means nothing more exotic than quatrains.
Jascha Heifetz once composed a piece of popular music under the pseudonym Jim Hoyle — and was called Jim by his friends from then on.
Fritz, Nietzsche was known as among intimates.
Point Barrow, Alaska. August 15, 1935.
Once more before he dies Author will reread Huckleberry Finn.
Alprazolam.
Demosthenes, to conquer his speech impediment:
Shouting orations into the surf with a mouth full of pebbles — or declaiming while running up and down hills.
Does anyone in Shakespeare have more lines than Hamlet?
Lily Tomlin’s program note that the understudy for her one-woman show was Zinka Milanov.
Who sued for two million dollars.
More than 60 percent of the people in the United States have not read a book from beginning to end since adolescence.
If then.
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.
Mickey Cochrane. Ray Schalk. Nap Rucker.
Peggy Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind was commonly called.
Nate West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts.
I have not for these things fished in other men’s waters; my Bible and my Concordance are my only library in my writing.
Said John Bunyan.
Isocrates, who starved himself to death. At ninety-eight.
Johnson wrote Rasselas in one week of evenings to pay for his mother’s funeral.
John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill to keep himself out of debtors’ prison.
Arcetri, near Florence, Galileo died in.
You can’t see out of the back of your head. I do not think there is any record of a man being able to criticize the people that came after him.
Said Pound.
Impecunitis.
What a joy — that syntax is no longer subversive in the White House.
Said John Steinbeck after the election of John F. Kennedy.
Yeats had his tonsils removed at fifty-five — by Dr. Oliver St. John Gogarty.
Tom Eliot. Wally Stevens.
At twenty-nine, Toscanini conducted the world premiere of La Bohème.
And conducted it again on its fiftieth anniversary.
The first occasion on which the word shit appeared in the New Yorker:
Quoting Richard M. Nixon.
Forgetting by now that Frieda Lawrence’s brother was Baron Manfred von Richthofen.
What Palestrina would have made of a Stockhausen score.
What Giotto would make of a Gerhard Richter canvas.
When you have a tan, she said, what have you got?
Dottie Parker.
Schopenhauer on critics:
Mistaking their own toy trumpets for the trombones of fame.
During the night after Modigliani’s death, and before her suicide from a fifth-floor window, Jeanne Hébuterne repeatedly sketched self-portraits that showed her stabbing herself with a knife.
Samuel Pepys owned 2,474 books.
De Quincey owned five thousand.
Wordsworth fewer than three hundred.