Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince while living on Long Island.
Well past fifty, Tolstoy began an intensive study of Hebrew with a Moscow rabbi — not very many years after having devoted similar concentration to mastering Greek.
The awareness of not having accomplished anything, and not expecting to accomplish anything in the future, is not so terrible because Tolstoy makes up for all of us.
Concluded Chekhov.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.
Says Agamemnon to Menelaus — essentially about commencing the Trojan War — in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.
Act. Then call upon the gods.
Says another Euripides fragment.
That tampon painter.
Joan Mitchel called Helen Frankenthaler.
The friendship of Zola and Cézanne.
Tracing back to when they were boys of twelve and thirteen.
The big tragedy for the poet is poverty.
Said Patrick Kavanagh.
Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies.
Lamented Melville rather earlier.
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head.
For a time, at the Tuileries, Napoleon kept the Mona Lisa in his bedroom.
Only this tardily realizing — that if he had not made use of his middle name, among the better-known twentieth-century American poets would be a William Williams.
One of the two listed witnesses at the wedding of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, was the church janitor.
Turgenev was sentenced to a month in jail, and subsequent banishment from St. Petersburg, for the simple act of having written an obituary of Gogol, whose work was considered subversive by czarist authorities.
I absolutely cannot do without it.
Says Tchaikovsky’s diary, about alcohol.
Veronese’s Finding of Moses, at the Prado.
In which Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens are shown in clothing not worn until the Renaissance.
The last time anyone mentioned Erskine Caldwell.
Lorca was thirty-eight when he was murdered.
Everywhere Lorca went he found a piano.
Rafael Alberti remembered of him.
Met him pike hoses.
Had Sir Thomas Beecham ever conducted any Stockhausen?
No. But he believed he had trodden in some.
Before the Euro, the portrait of Yeats on Ireland’s twenty-pound note.
America’s Whitman twenty-dollar bill, when?
The Melville ten?
One of the rare pieces of expository writing by a woman in antiquity — a list of rules for behavior when visiting an exclusive house of prostitution.
Left by one Gnathaena, in third-century Athens, and actually catalogued in the great library of Alexandria until its destruction.
No more than ten or twelve weeks after an actress he had been living with took her own life, Gottfried Benn was engaged to another woman.
1427–1429. Being the closest one can evidently come to a date for the death of Masaccio.
The Threepenny Opera. For which Brecht stole much of the language from someone else’s German translation of the original John Gay version — and for which he was ultimately forced to surrender part of his royalties.
Truth lies at the bottom of a well.
Cicero says Democritus said.
Truth lies at the bottom of a well.
Rabelais says Heraclitus said.
I’ve had it with those cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Growled Kenneth Rexroth.
Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.
Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.
God help us, did I not tell your Grace that those were nothing but windmills?
All cats are grey in the dark.
What would non-creative writing be?
George Steiner once casually wondered.
Musicke, the Elizabethan spelling was.
Hydeous. Swolne. Perswasion. Sinne. Subtill.
Brightnesse falls from the ayre.
He would not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry.
Said Cyril Connolly of Orwell.
Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic exchange with Richard Nixon, as preserved on White House tapes.
E. M. Forster lived with his mother until her death when he was sixty-six.
Children of Palestrina, Verdi referred to Italian composers as.
Bastien-Lepage was dead at thirty-six.
Aubrey Beardsley was dead at twenty-five.
The somewhat notorious soprano Susanna Cibber. Who sang so movingly in an early performance of Handel’s Messiah that a Dublin bishop informed her afterward that any and all of her earthly sins were therewith irrevocably forgiven.
Charlotte Brontë died in March of 1855.
The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, whom she had married nine months before, would live until 1906.
A daughter of Dickens lived until 1929.
After Jean Stafford, vacationing, had explained to a weathered Wyoming ranch hand how she made her living:
That’s real nice work. I reckon you can even always arrange to do it in the shade.
Wondering why it always seems somehow not quite accurate — that Mozart was born only fourteen years before Beethoven.
Now I’ll have eine kleine pause.
Said Kathleen Ferrier — dying.
British cavalry in the Crimean War were so scandalously ill-supplied and neglected that many starved to death — as did the very horses that had survived the Charge of the Light Brigade.
February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed on.
Picasso, avec laughter, after being asked if he had used models for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:
Where would I have found them?
A dreadful old fraud.
Edmund Wilson called Robert Frost.
A sententious, holding-forth old bore who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word.
James Dickey would elaborate subsequently.
Edith Piaf was four feet eight inches tall.
George Lyman Kittredge, who taught Shakespeare at Harvard for forty-eight years — and demanded that all of his students memorize at least six hundred lines per semester.