Next to the originator of a great sentence is the first quoter of it.
Said Emerson.
Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them.
Said Thucydides.
Depressed at the apparent lack of interest in one of his early still lifes, Matisse visited his dealer to retrieve it, only to learn that it had been purchased after all.
By Picasso.
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.
And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.
A time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.
Mark Rothko once said.
Rupert Brooke’s obituary in the London Times, at his death in the Aegean in World War I, was written by Winston Churchill.
Dostoievsky’s four years as a convict at hard labor in Siberia — where he lived always in a barracks.
Meaning that for four full years he essentially never had one moment to himself.
He is not writing about something; he is writing something.
Said Samuel Beckett, re Joyce.
He never thinks about something; he thinks something.
Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.
Not bright colors. Good drawing.
Titian said.
The great early nineteenth-century diva Catalani, in retirement in Paris, is told she has an anonymous visitor. At the door, a young woman bows her head in modesty:
Madame, I have come to ask your blessing. My name is Jenny Lind.
Fragonard, ignored and forgotten in later life, but painting nonetheless:
I would paint with my backside if necessary.
Realizing that as recently as in the case of Haydn, musicians under the patronage of royalty were still treated as servants — and still wore livery.
An even earlier dismayed recognition of Dürer’s, while visiting in Venice in 1506:
Here I am a gentleman — and at home a mere parasite.
We advise no woman to read this book.
Said a first review of Père Goriot.
Truly, young girls and women about to become mothers would do well, if they are wise, to run away from this spectacle.
Said another, of Manet’s Olympia.
At twenty-two, William Faulkner was a special student for a semester at the University of Mississippi — and was given a grade of D in English.
Corresponding with him in later years, Allen Tate became aware that Faulkner habitually signed his letters with only his last name — and mentioned that English nobility signed letters that way.
Faulkner never wrote to Tate again.
The sun is as wide as a man’s foot.
Judged Heraclitus.
The size of a foot soldier’s shield.
Lucretius decided.
Einstein was reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at thirteen.
Kant died in 1804. More than seven hundred different authors had published books and/or essays on his work in the preceding two decades.
Clodia, whom Catullus immortalized as Lesbia in his verse — and Cicero dismissed as what can best be translated as that farthing whore.
Every half-quarter of an Hour, a glass of Sack must be sent of an errand into his Guts, to tell his Brains they must come up quickly, and help out with a line.
Said a minor poet named Robert Wilde of Ben Jonson at work.
He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse.
Similarly said John Aubrey of Andrew Marvell.
Christina Rossetti’s practice of pasting heavy paper over irreligious passages in Swinburne.
E.g., a line referring to the supreme evil, God, unquote, in Atalanta in Calydon.
January 23, 1931, Anna Pavlova died on.
Renoir, well into his forties and still impoverished.
So thin it wrung your heart, a woman friend remembered.
Yehudi Menuhin performed as a soloist with the San Francisco Orchestra at the age of seven.
A dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.
E. M. Forster called Ulysses.
Conscious and calculated indecency.
Virginia Woolf settled for.
Along with tosh — presumably signifying something akin to twaddle.
So preoccupied was Thomas Hobbes with geometry that he sometimes diagrammed propositions on his bedsheets.
Or inked them on his thigh.
Unendurable to the music lover, Beethoven was becoming.
Said a contemporary critic — of the Eroica.
A depraved ear.
Said one of the same — of Mozart’s D-minor quartet.
Item, I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.
So often unnoted — that by law Anne automatically also received one-third of the estate.
Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean —
And the insistence of one of the witnesses that he was pulled under by sharks.
I was much impressed by the chalk-white face with the swollen purple lips, and felt confident he had been brooding over the Crucifixion all night, or some other holy torture.
Said William Empson re sightings of Eliot, ca. 1930.
Who will buy me, who will buy me,
rid me of my cares?
Very nearly three hundred times, in Oliver Twist, Fagin is referred to as the Jew.
Curiously leaving Dickens nonetheless distressed when the book was taken as anti-Semitic.
Hegel, asking Schelling’s advice about a town to settle in, and listing his chief requirements:
A good library and ein gutes Bier — a good beer.
Women were not granted degrees at Oxford until as late as 1920.
A head of hair like an umbrella.
Someone said Berlioz had.
Like a great primeval forest.
Heinrich Heine made it.
Schopenhauer’s mother Johanna wrote novels. When she playfully belittled his own first book, Schopenhauer told her it would still be available long after hers were forgotten.
Indeed, the entire first printing would still be, Johanna Schopenhauer said.
Rodin’s monument to Victor Hugo — which was rejected by the group that commissioned it.
Rodin’s monument to Balzac — which was rejected by the group that commissioned it.
Rodin’s monument to Whistler — et cetera.
Quoth Charlie Parker, showing someone the veins at which he injected heroin:
This one’s my Cadillac —
And this one’s my house.
Adolf Hitler’s occupation, as listed on his tax returns until such time as he officially became Germany’s chancellor: