Quotes from David Markson

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.

Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

He had a face roughly the shape and color of a clumsily peeled Idaho potato, and he had a jaw like the end of a cigarette carton.

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster , who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce —to which in fact he was once taken. Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne —who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.

In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in.

Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one's stomach when hungry.

Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.

Coincidences undeniably imply meaning. I am rereading Hart Crane. I notice the date On which he stepped off that boat Was April 26. Tomorrow is April 26. The year of his suicide was 1932. I was four. I am now fifty-one. One undeniable implication in this case then Is that the year, today, Is 1979. Afterward, Crane's mother scrubbed floors. Eventually, I may or may not Jump overboard. Are there questions?

I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. "Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

I like Mr. Dickens' books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray's daughters.

Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalene who did the dishes at the Last Supper. Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

if one wishes to see a cat badly enough, one will doubtless see one.