Small talk

Me: I don't drink white wine.
KR: You're sitting in front of a painting writing a classical music review.

Best of Bowra

"I expect to pass through this world but once and therefore if there is anybody I want to kick in the crotch I had better kick them in the crotch now, for I do not expect to pass this way again."

- Maurice Bowra, Professor of Poetry, University of Oxford

Rationalisation

"The BBC has stated that it plans to do fewer things better"

- BBC announcement, BBC news.

From the horse's face

"It’s a funny thing about life that, when you put it in a novel, it’s dead."

- Martin Amis, in Prospect

Pour mon camarade

How did they command such deference - English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or a novel strewn about in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They'd stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even, on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.

- Tobias Wolff, Old School

Not lost in transLaportation

No-one carries the English in their hearts.

- Bernard Laporte

Meanwhile, in the Times Education Supplement....

"The pressure is on the author to deliver as enriching an experience as video games do."

- Jeff Kinney

Verbatim

"I find Jewish things very funny. Apart from the Holocaust."

- KJW

A precursory glance

Every writer creates his own precursors.

- Borges, 'Kafka and His Precursors'

Gawd...

It is impossible for a man to read and earn money at the same time, unless he is a reviewer, and Ruggiero prayed never to fall so low.

- Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies

[Personally, I gotta say I've never found it possible to read and earn money even while being a reviewer. But there it is.]

The deafening sound of silence

"You're not saying anything. That speaks volumes."

Fame, Branded

"My persona don't really work without fame. Without fame, this haircut could be mistaken for mental illness."

- Russell Brand

Couldn't agrizzle more. Here's me today, writing:






Hmmm... Maybe need to work on my back-comb.

Logical curveball

"Sir, are we allowed to ask questions?"

Priorities

"I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect."

- EM Forster, interviewed by the BBC on his 80th birthday

Coetzee on Emants on Turgenev

In 1880 [Marcellus] Emants published an essay on Turgenev which describes his own philosophy rather better than it does Turgenev's.

- JM Coetzee, Stranger Shores: essays 1986-1999

Ain't that always the way?

Thought for the day

"On a good day, writing about my life is the most sublime, cathartic, godly, and honest thing I could ever imagine doing ... On a bad day, however, it’s narcissistic and unimaginative. My pathetic life plays back like some annoying Top 40s jingle that lodges in the head and won’t leave."

- Jamie Brisick, in the latest issue of Five Dials.

For our American readers

Irony has to contain an element of suffering in it, (Otherwise it is the attitude of a know-it-all.)

- Robert Musil, Diaries

Criteria for entry into the writing 'profession'

Sick
highly complex
neurasthenic
in some respects of unsound mind
in other respects perverse...

-Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession

On essay-writing*

There is something undeniably boring about ordering thoughts long familiar to reasonably clever people for the sake of some external purpose.

- Robert Musil, 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' (1911), Precision and Soul

--
* Equally, 'On journalism'...

The great thinkers: part 1

"Tea tempers the spirit and harmonises the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties."

- Confucius, 8am Monday