'Royd rage

And what am I most proud of having achieved in these eight years? I am proud never to have used the word 'movie', and of never having had a quotation from one of my reviews used to adorn a cinema advertisement. Goodbye.

- Peter Ackroyd signs off as film critic of the Spectator, 1987

Hemingways: 4

My ex-girlfriend is just over there.

On the German

It sounds like typewriters eating tinfoil being kicked down the stairs.

- Dylan Moran

Why, I write

To be a writer - to really be a writer - you need people to think of you as a writer, and talk about you as a writer, and introduce you to their friends (and preferably a couple of editors and publishers) as a writer.

Or if you don't, I do. And since I'm the writer here...

It is written

He is one of the wrecks of civilisation - ruined by education, poisoned by knowledge... unhinged by books, art and music.

- Leonard Woolf, on BJ Dutton

InDefinition - 26

nyetwork, n. circle of jobless acquaintances

The case for/of procrastination

The longing for success, the doubt of ever being able to achieve the kinds of success which have to be earned, and the certainty of being able to have at this moment a kind which does not, play dangerously into each other's hands.

- WH Auden, The Age of Anxiety

Literally (lit.)

A web-page devoted to Jamie Redknapp's illiteralisms.

Splendid.

[Thanks to SL]

non sequitur

Me: It's freezing in here.
Mother: It's the month of July!

Slow books, slow irony

Only on the internet (and/or, indeed, on guardian.co.uk) could a panegyric to the Book Barge and the whole concept of independent bookshops come with adverts for ABE Books and The Book Depository as standard.