Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent. Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass. Not to omit ithyphallic audacity. Plus garbage.

Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense. Among some for the best of Shelley. Which was also called abominable.

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on. Said Voltaire.

I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it. Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print. Said John Donne's very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.

He never thinks about something; he thinks something. Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.

Realizing that as recently as in the case of Haydn, musicians under the patronage of royalty were still treated as servants – and still wore livery.

He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse. Said John Aubrey of Andrew Marvell.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. Announced Petronius.

The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later. Said Louis Aragon.

Was he Christian, Jewish or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dublin courtroom. To which: None of the three.

The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. An early French critic called Dostoevsky.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. Said Cyril Connolly.

Kant's irrationally compulsive 3.30PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years – on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau's Emile.

The sound of Paul Desmond's alto saxophone: Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale. Being Kierkegaard – on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

If you value my work, please, do not knock. Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse's door in Ticino.

A fiend of a book. The action is laid out in Hell – only it seems places and people have English names there. Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

It is never difficult to paint, said Dali. It is either easy or impossible.

Thinking with someone else's brain. Schopenhauer called reading.

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both. Johnson once told Boswell.

A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

Chopin was buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris – but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world – is that he does not exist. Stendhal said.

Dostoevsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss. Einstein said.

'Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul. Said Pope, re writing well.

A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow – is it always the book? Asked Lichtenberg.

Not to be born is far best. Wrote Sophocles.

Not to be born at all would be the best thing. Wrote Theognis, at least a half a century earlier.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God. Said Rumi.

Morningless sleep. Epicurus called death.

Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God: they pass all understanding. Said James I.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting. Said Borges.

Like a vile scum on a pond. Pound viewed G K Chesterton.

Borges' vision of Paradise: A kind of library.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them. Said Francois Mauriac.

I'm a poet, I'm life. You're an editor, you're death. Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse tavern – who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within. Wrote Michaelangelo at eighty-one – himself with eight years remaining.

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will. Said Goya – nearing eighty.

It is later than you know. Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock – after having broken off its hands.

from David Markson's, The Last Novel