Enrico Fermi once wrote an entire full-length textbook on atomic physics in pencil — without an eraser.
Eighty-eight years after his death, almost fifty Turner canvases, rolled up and inexplicably mislabeled as tarpaulins, were come upon by sheerest chance in National Gallery storage rooms.
Valladolid, Christopher Columbus died in.
After drinking heavily, Philip of Macedon once pronounced a judgment that an elderly woman said she would appeal.
Appeal to whom, when I am your king?
To my king when he is sober.
Philip reversed his judgment.
Ambition for wealth is the enemy of artistic excellence.
Warned Leon Battista Alberti — in 1436.
O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than the desire for renown, for this latter achievement is a far greater thing than riches.
Wrote Leonardo two generations afterward.
George Moore once walked in on Swinburne, uninvited, to find him striding back and forth declaiming Aeschylus at the top of his voice — stark naked.
The first opera Toscanini ever saw, at the age of four, was Un Ballo in Maschera.
The last opera Toscanini ever conducted, at the age of eighty-seven, was Un Ballo in Maschera.
A sixth-century AD sporting event, as Novelist remembers it from Beowulf:
Holding one’s opponent under water until he is drowned.
Fenimore Cooper used almost eleven hundred Shakespeare quotations as epigraphs and/or chapter headings in his thirty-plus novels.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Said Stravinsky.
The thought of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy, at fifty. Of his possessions — his paintings — being sold for whatever pittance they might bring. Of Rembrandt himself being evicted from his home.
Rembrandt.
Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.
Says the opening of Book XI of the Iliad.
Now Dawn arose from her couch beside the lordly Tithonos, to bear light to the immortals and to mortal men.
Says the opening of Book V of the Odyssey.
He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.
Said Auden of Tennyson.
Not conspicuously intelligent.
Auden added re Yeats.
Advice from Arthur Schnabel to the younger Vladimir Horowitz:
When a piece gets difficult, make faces.
The greatest love specialist in the world, Samuel Goldwyn called Freud.
While offering him $100,000 to supervise or even write a romantic story for Hollywood.
Freud at the time was asking fees of twenty dollars an hour. He dismissed Goldwyn with a one-sentence note.
Discovering that the Cynara to whom Ernest Dowson had been faithful in his fashion was in fact a London waitress.
Wagner has some fine moments. But some bad quarters of an hour.
Said Rossini.
The color of cognac.
Rodin described Suzanne Valadon’s hair as.
The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.
Announced Petronius.
You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.
Flaubert put it.
Fra Filippo Lippi was past fifty, and the chaplain of a convent, when he abducted the nun by whom he would have two children — one of the same being the Filippino who would follow him as an artist.
Albert Pinkham Ryder dressed so shabbily that now and again people attempted to hand him loose change as he walked the streets near Greenwich Village.
The artist must live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord.
Ryder said.
Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.
Said Flannery O’Connor — apropos of being a Southern writer as a contemporary of Faulkner’s.
Among the many paintings in her Paris flat, Gertrude Stein had two exceptional Picassos.
If there were a fire, and I could save only one picture, it would be those two. Unquote.
August 15, 1967, René Magritte died on.
Victor Hugo constantly made notes about everything — and would turn aside in the middle of a conversation to scribble down something he himself had just said that he realized he might possibly later be able to use.
O Lord, who art hidden in the clouds and behind the cobbler’s house —
Commenced a prayer voiced by Marc Chagall as a boy in Vitebsk.
The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.
Said Louis Aragon.
Novelist’s isolation — ever increasing as the years pass also.
Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator.
Matt Arnold, he was commonly called.
Jack Galsworthy.
The grete poete of Ytaille.
Chaucer referred to Dante as — in the late fourteenth century.
Though there would be no English translation of the Divine Comedy until 1785.
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
Insisted Byron.
Was he Christian, Jewish, or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which:
None of the three.
The extant application for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum signed by Arthur Rimbaud on March 25, 1873, attesting that he has read the regulations for the Reading Room and that he is not under twenty-one years of age — when in truth he was still only eighteen.
Catullus, informing friends that he is broke:
With nothing but cobwebs in my wallet.
The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.
An early French critic called Dostoievsky.
Foul. Like a rat, slithering along in hate. He is not nice.
Being D. H. Lawrence’s later view.
The concept of life after death should be empathically promulgated by the state, Plato said.
If only so that soldiers would be willing to die in battle.
George Washington left no children of his own.
A great-granddaughter of Martha’s, by way of her earlier marriage, married Robert E. Lee.
The most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.
Said Clara Schumann of Tristan und Isolde.
Plutarch, who relinquished fame and power in Rome to live quietly and do his writing in Chaeronea, near Delphi.
A small town that would have been even smaller if I left.
Brave translunary things.
Michael Drayton saw in Marlowe.