David Markson - This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

Said Massenet of his religious compositions.

When cohabitating, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.

Said Maimonides.

Adolf Eichmann read Lolita while awaiting trial in Jerusalem.

And was indignant over what he termed its unwholesomeness.

Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers.

Says Hemingway in a letter.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

The winter during which Shelley and Thomas Love Peacock attended at least six performances of Don Giovanni .

There is nothing perfect in this world, Peacock said. Except Mozart.

Thackeray started out as an artist.

And was rejected when an illustrator was being sought for the first installments of Pickwick Papers by the equally young Dickens.

The Reverend Eliot, Pound at times called him.

The Tsetse, Conrad Aiken had it.

The main house on Horace’s Sabine farm, given to him by Maecenas, was a mansion of no less than twenty-four rooms.

Voltaire’s mansion at Ferney had fourteen bedrooms.

Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

Like Osama bin Laden.

Incredibly shallow, Wittgenstein called A. J. Ayer.

While also dismissing Plato as a frightful waste of time — unquote.

Does anyone ever die who is not remembered through the remainder of at least one other entire lifetime by someone ?

From future transmigrations save my soul.

Thales of Miletus, asked why he never became a father:

Because I love children.

Asked to name the easiest task in life:

To give advice.

Trying to recall a single view of landscape — or just once a patch of sunlight — in a Dostoievsky novel.

Trying to recall a single scene in all of Jane Austen showing male characters only, without a woman present.

Mantua, Giulio Romano died in.

Bologna, Guido Reni.

Dating from as long ago as 1600—complaints about pollution of the air in London from excessive industrial use of coal. Inquinating the blood, said Sir Thomas Browne, causing catarrhs and coughs.

A traveler smelled London before he saw it, said John Evelyn.

And somebody’s gotta pay the rent.

It isn’t sex that causes trouble for young ballplayers. It’s staying up all night looking for it.

Said Casey Stengel.

Doomsday accounts of our souls, Ibsen called poetry.

Now Barabbas was a robber.

Says John 18:40.

Now Barabbas was a publisher.

Said Byron.

Delacroix posed for one of the figures in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.

Géricault’s portraits of the mad. Done at the Salpetrière asylum and elsewhere — via special permission.

The legend that Aesop was thrown to his death over a cliff at Delphi by priests — because of blasphemy.

Ad Reinhardt, on why so many painters did their drinking at the Cedar Tavern:

To run into the people they most disliked. Other painters.

Boccaccio’s eyewitness description of the Black Death. Samuel Pepys’ of the Fire of London.

Emile Durkheim was the son of a rabbi.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was the grandson of a rabbi.

The last recorded execution for witchcraft in Europe occurred in Switzerland, in 1782.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.

Said Brendan Behan.

Michael Puchberg.

Reggio nell’Emilia, Ferruccio Tagliavini died in.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Helen marries Achilles.

The myth that in the Elysian Fields, Medea marries Achilles.

The myth that Helen is hanged from a tree by envious women.

Nothing but a bunch of damned bullshit.

Said Harry Truman of Douglas MacArthur’s Old Soldiers Never Die speech.

Evidently not one word was said in print in Milton’s lifetime about Lycidas, L’Allegro , or Il Penseroso .

Persistently lingering, why? — that image of that woman washing her face in a toilet bowl.

And when once she was young and delicate and fair?

But having nothing to do with the question of why, again, still, is Author so often so damnably tired?

La chair est triste, hélas! et fai lu tous les livres.

At seventy-seven, Georges Rouault burned no less than 315 canvases that he felt were not as good as they might be — and that he would never find time to do more work on.

Johann Theophilus Goldberg.

The cloudy perception that labels Hardy a better poet than novelist.

Lessing wrote Laocoön without ever having seen the sculpture.

Hegel and Fichte are buried next to each other in Berlin.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Edna St. Vincent Millay—

And only afterward became aware that she was sleeping with at least four other men at the same time that she was seeing him.

Eugene O’Neill, who died rich, left not one cent in his will to any of his three children.

Einstein. Churchill. Shaw.

All of whom went out of their way to meet Charlie Chaplin.

Never seeming to remember that Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is based on a poem by George Crabbe.

Francois Villon’s heatless garret near the Sorbonne — where his inkwell froze solid.

Saint Anthony lived 105 years.

Without ever learning to read or write.

Perfection in life is to carry out in maturity the dreams of one’s youth.

Said Alfred de Vigny.

When Chagall paints you do not know if he is asleep or awake. Somewhere or other inside his head there must be an angel.

Said Picasso.

Let us indulge our own lunacy.

Said Chagall.

Guido of Arezzo. Who gave the names to the first six notes of the scale.

Ca. 1040 AD.

Willem de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until he was forty-three.

From Seneca, writing to a friend about suicide:

But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter?

Edith Stein.

Endlösung .

Gauguin fathered at least four illegitimate children in Tahiti.

In addition to the legitimate clan he had deserted at home.

Zeuxis, who ultimately began to give away his paintings — because they had simply become beyond price.

Though Aristotle would call Polygnotus the greater artist.

Bordeaux, Goya died in.

Truman Capote’s mother was a suicide. His adoptive father, whose name he had taken, went to prison for grand larceny.

Vaness, sí . Battle, no.

Schumann’s ever-increasing intermittent madness.

Once being visited by the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn — and making note of a theme he insisted they had given him.

Demons and hyenas at the worst of it, he also saw.

Always acknowledge the gift of a book before there has been time to read it, said Eliot.

If you wait you will have to commit yourself to an opinion.

There are many Nobel Prize winners I wouldn’t want as friends.

Said a member of the Swedish Academy after the award to V. S. Naipaul.

Karl Marx learned Russian mainly to read Pushkin. Joyce learned Norwegian to read Ibsen.

At the age of three, Jeremy Bentham read a then-current eight-volume history of England.

Joseph Brodsky had no schooling after the age of fifteen.

Lawrence Sterne’s love letters to his mistress:

Which he sometimes copied word for word from letters he had earlier written to his wife.

According to Castiglione, two self-important Vatican cardinals once informed Raphael that the faces of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in one of his paintings were too red.

And were informed by Raphael in turn that he had given the matter much thought — and was convinced the saints would be blushing in heaven to see their church governed by men such as themselves.