There is only one person who has the right to criticize me, do you understand? And that is Picasso. Said Matisse late in life.

Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.

Paul Celan's body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau. Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.

Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theare.

Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.

Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.

The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.

Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.

Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.

Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.

Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems: Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.

Schopenhauer was found dead sitting at his breakfast.

And Sir Launcelot awoke, and went and took his horse, and rode all that day and all night in a forest, weeping.

Pope offended so many people with Dunciad that he subsequently never left home without pistols.

Nietzsche, on George Sand: A writing cow.

Among Wittgenstein's spellings, when using English. Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann't.

David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs. Edward Gibbon became equally so. Amy Lowell as well.

The height of absuridty in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senselesss and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel. Said Schopenhauer.

Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.

The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29-30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone – A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned. Ergo Michaelangelo. And cetera.

Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying …

According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West. And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

Splenddid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.

Brainsick. Trolius's word for Cassandra in Trolius and Cressida.

In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird. He said.

The Reader. Being Aristotle's nickname at Plato's Academy.

A colt that kicks its mother. Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.

An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes. Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?

Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probably that he never saw the ocean either.

The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. Kierkegaard called reading one's reviews.

The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed. And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.

A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway. Ninety prcent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein.

Branwell – Emily – Anne – are gone like dreams – gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm. Said Charlotte, late along.

Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head – so that he would be too embarassed to leave his house.

Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Hervard: Should an elephant teach zoology?

For centuries, in England: The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads. And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Said Cesare Pavese.

I am real!, said Alice, and began to cry.

The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.

the legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.

Only one person, his secretary, attended Leibniz's funeral.

Tell me, pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is that now sways the world?  – Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.

The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you. Said Marcus Aurelius.

Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Says a Van Gogh letter.

From David Markson's This Is Not A Novel