David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Amelia Earhart flied the Atlantic?

Wondering if youngsters still read The Count of Monte Cristo .

Practically all those interviewed in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster agreed that they had never confronted anything more horrendous.

Author’s curiosity as to whether anyone thought to inquire of the writer of Slaughterhouse-Five.

One should always read with a pen in one’s hand. Says Delacroix in the Journals .

Dickens’ best friend when, at twelve, he worked in the blacking factory:

A boy named Bob Fagin.

Verdi wrote Il Trovatore and La Traviata in less than a month each.

As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge them.

Said Tecumseh.

Several of Montaigne’s ancestors — Jews, on his mother’s side — had been burned at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition.

It is setting a high value on our opinions to roast people alive on account of them.

Said Montaigne himself not unreasonably.

Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Which Byron, Scott, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Thackeray, Rossetti, Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson all admired.

Picasso. Joan Mini. Philip Guston. Willem de Kooning.

Who were all devoted to Krazy Kat .

Pomes Penyeach.

Sophocles, in old age, on finally being free from sexual urgings:

Like escaping from bondage to a raving maniac.

Pope Leo X, to Sebastiano del Piombo, as to why he was holding off on commissions for Michelangelo:

There is absolutely no getting on with the man.

Pope Clement VII, a decade later:

When Buonarroti comes to see me, I always take a seat and bid him be seated himself at once — feeling positive that he will do so without leave or license otherwise.

On one of his visits to the wreck of his ship early in the novel, Robinson Crusoe finds gold — but quickly realizes it is of no value to him at all.

However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.

A fraud and a fake, Nabokov called Eliot.

Needing a moment to remember that Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and, was also the composer of Onward, Christian Soldiers .

And The Lost Chord .

Orchard Street, in Manhattan, Jan Peerce grew up on.

Heidelberg, Fritz Wunderlich died in.

Sarah Siddons was a member of the eminent eighteenth-century Kemble acting clan.

Born, naturally, in an obscure small-town inn while the family was on tour.

Alleged of a fellow violinist at the American debut of Jascha Heifetz. Is it warm in here?

To which the man next to him: Not for pianists.

Swift’s dedication in A Tale of a Tub :

To His Royal Highness Prince Posterity.

To feel pain at the misfortunes of others is a weakness unworthy of the wise man.

Said Seneca.

As late as well into the fifth century, Saint Augustine was finding it necessary to rebuke certain Christians for still celebrating December 25 as the winter solstice — i.e., the rebirth of the sun — rather than as the Nativity of Christ.

Chares of Lindus, who in 278 BC designed the great bronze Colossus of Rhodes. And then committed suicide when it far overran its construction budget.

In future we shall feel obliged if you will send us the milk and the water in separate cans.

Said Constable in a note to his dairyman.

Arthur Koestler was condemned to death as a spy by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.

But released in a high-level prisoner exchange.

Paul Celan was apparently comfortable in translating verse from no fewer than eight languages.

Leonardo, explaining to the Duke of Milan how it occurred that he might sit in front of The Last Supper for hours and not add a single brushstroke:

Men of genius often are doing most when they work least.

To take charge of this post and all government property in view.

To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.

The friendship of Babe Ruth and Bix Beiderbecke.

Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato.

Said Savonarola.

Greta Garbo was never married.

I think it a very grievous punishment, in the liberal arts, to display oneself to fools, and to expose our compositions to the barbarous judgment of the stupid.

Said Molière.

Was Walter Benjamin the first to point out that where every home once possessed room after room in which people had died, in today’s world virtually everyone dies somewhere else?

A vulgar, brutal boor, wholly ignorant of political science, of military affairs, of everthing else which a statesman should know.

Said a London journal of Lincoln at the start of the Civil War.

Dostoievsky wrote The Eternal Husband in Dresden. And had to borrow the money to mail it to his publisher in St. Petersburg.

Two years earlier, while writing The Idiot :

They demand from me artistic finish, the purity of poetry, and they point to Turgenev and Goncharov. Let them take a look at the conditions under which I work.

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

Tchaikovsky, leaving Bayreuth after the first full four-day performance of the Ring :

As if I’d been let out of prison.

Peg Woffington.

Habitual incest with his sisters, Suetonius says Caligula practiced.

When not prostituting them to his favorites.

Geraldine Farrar’s Carmen , where Caruso as Don José had to literally wrestle her away to avoid being kicked and punched in Act III, let alone continue to sing.

On the Continent the works of Shakespeare are honored in a double way; by the admiration of Italy and Germany, and by the contempt of the French.

Said Coleridge.

Xenophon, who learned that the older of his two sons had been killed in battle — and who did not weep.

I knew my son was mortal.

Roman Jews recited the Kaddish for three days at the site of Caesar’s funeral pyre — in gratitude for the freedom of worship he had granted them.

Locarno, Erich Maria Remarque died in.

Was Farrar the finest Carmen ever? Was Mary Garden the finest Salome?

Whose word can Author take that Emmy Destinn may have been the finest Cio-Cio-San?

An heroic mess, Victor Hugo called Delacroix.

Le grand Maître, Cézanne always spoke of him as.

John Gielgud was a great-nephew of Ellen Terry.

Twenty-one times, in the Iliad , the Trojans are labeled tamers of horses.

Not once is anyone ever seen halting to scrape off his sandals.

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, In the coming world, they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?

Says a Hasidic tale.

One should never allow the impression of one’s body to remain in the bedclothes after arising.

Said Pythagoras.

Freud once attended a lecture by Mark Twain.

The French disease, syphilis was initially called in Europe.

The excellence of a poet is inseparably associated with the excellence of the man himself, and it is impossible for one to become a good poet unless he has previously become a good man.

Said Strabo.

He was a bum poet, of course, being a bum person.

Said Robert Graves of D. H. Lawrence.

The man is disreputable and his poems are among the worst ever seen.

Said Anatole France of Paul Verlaine.

A great deal of nuclear waste will still be lethal six times as far into the future as all of recorded history presently goes back into the past.