I expect you have heard that, having failed as (a) a civil servant, (b) a novelist, (c) an editor, (d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung... — literary journalism.- Leonard Woolf, to Lytton Strachey
You say that the title pages of French translations of your books read, Traduit de l'americain. Mine say Traduit de l'anglais (Sud-Africaine).- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011
This is not the American Transatlantic, it's the English one.- John Lucas, poet
she was quick to reply 'Not at all, as the fish said,' or just 'As the fish said,' or simply 'Fish,' to summarize this saying: 'Not at all, as the fish said when asked how he'd like to be cooked, in the oven or the fryer.'- Alejandro Zambra, via James Wood, in The New Yorker
The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancient, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered- Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus
I would have thought we would have developed different terms for two very different moral acts.- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011
In a digressionary footnote, he repeats a story out of Plutarch: did you know that Caesar's assassin Brutus was similarly afflicted with bulimia on his march to the Battle of Philippi?- Hugh Aldersey-Williams, on Sir Thomas Browne's 'Boulimia Centenaria'
He would not have shared the king's love of fart jokes.- Hugh Aldersey-Williams, The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century
My mother said, "Oh, it's as dark as a grave."- Qais Akbar Omar, A Fort of Nine Towers
I thought for a moment. How did my mother know how dark a grave is?
"Have you ever been in a grave?" I asked her.
"Stop being silly," she chided as she went to find candles.
My older sister had been doing her homework. "There is no electricity in a grave, idiot," she said. "Of course it is dark."
Though Whitman gives the impression that he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater and provides a dramatic description of the event, he was not in fact there. But he did believe he enjoyed a special relationship with Lincoln. Both men were tall.- JM Coetzee, in the NYRB
an attempt to instrumentalise or "weaponise" poetry for the purposes of fighting "the cultural war" is probably not something the US military should be engaged in.- Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Poetry of the Taliban
AS MOST PEOPLE KNOW, it’s not easy to make money writing. Young writers read of a mythical past when aspiring authors could work for “newspapers” in exotic locales like Kansas City, but even if there is still a newspaper operating out of some soon-to-be-abandoned warehouse on the banks of the Missouri, I bet it isn’t hiring. The BFA/MFA track has become one of the last refuges for young writers before they start fighting their way into the welfare state of grants and fellowships, and even if we remain undecided on the question of whether writing can be taught — if I have to read another essay asking that question I may run away to Kansas City myself — we have definitively declared that the teaching and learning of creative writing can be a good way to make money (or at least to postpone the need to do so).- Johannes Lichtman, in the LA Review of Books
John Williams’s Stoner is about an English professor defeated by department politics and his wife’s unreasoning hatred. In the copy I borrowed from my university library, someone had written, on the title page, Oddly comforting.- Jamie Fisher, in the LA Review of Books
