Quotes from David Markson

Or was it possibly...nothing more than a read ?

Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

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.

Although what I have basically been doing about the rain is ignoring it, to tell the truth. How I do that is by walking in it. I did not fail to notice that those last two sentences must certainly look like a contradiction, by the way. Even if they are on such thing. One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it. In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it.

Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically. Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then. Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

A simple creature unlettyrde. Julian of Norwich called herself. The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Echoed Jane Austen—four hundred years afterward.

In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with.

Helen ran off with a lover only once in her life herself, and for three thousand years nobody would ever let her forget about it.

One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really.

One can very agreeably ignore a rain by walking in it. In fact it is when one allows a rain to prevent one from walking in it that one is failing to ignore it. Surely by saying, dear me, I will get soaked through and through if I walk in this rain, for instance, one is in no way ignoring the rain.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

People who write novels only write them when they have very little else to write

Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.

Finally on Tuesday I understood why I was feeling depressed.

Planeando su Balzac, Rodin llegó a rastrear a un sastre que el novelista había empleado cuarenta años antes; y le encargó un traje con las medidas del muerto.

Una de las delicias ennoblecedoras del Paraíso, según lo prometió Tomás de Aquino: ver cómo allá abajo torturan y asan a los condenados.

Cuál es la utilidad de ser bueno con un pobre? Preguntó Cicerón.

Y tú quién eres? –dijo él. –No me confundas –dije yo. Dice Tristram Shandy VII 33.

Demasiadas notas, mi querido Mozart.

Jackson Pollock alguna vez fue asistente de David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Si es arte no es para todos, y si es para todos no es arte.

At the age of eight or nine, Richard Brautigan once returned home from school and found that his entire family had moved away without a word.