The Sheila Variations

Commonplace Book

"We must remember that a new theatre is coming after the war with a completely new criticism, thank God. The singular figures always stand a good chance when there are sweeping changes. Keep your ear to the ground and concentrate on honesty till you know what else is coming!"

-- Tennessee Williams to Horton Foote, April 24, 1943

Commonplace Book

"You must learn now, that the important lesson - as long as you have your health - is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying and yawning."

-- A.S. Byatt, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary"

Commonplace Book

"Don't be humble, son. You're not that good."

-- David Lee Roth's father to his son

Commonplace Book

"Just keep on writing. It is remarkable how one begins to know what is right."

-- Editor John Rood to Tennessee Williams, March 22, 1935

Commonplace Book

"I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health."

-- Noel Coward

Commonplace Book

"You must give up detesting everything appertaining to Oscar Wilde or to anyone else. The critic's first duty is to admit, with absolute respect, the right of every man to his own style."

-- George Bernard Shaw to R.E. Golding Bright, Nov. 19, 1894

Commonplace Book

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication."

-- Fran Leibowitz

Commonplace Book

"It was good of God to let [Thomas] Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four."

-- Samuel Butler

Commonplace Book

"To write adequately one must know, above all, how bad are one's first drafts."

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Commonplace Book

"All I really knew about what [Harold] Ross wished me to write was that it must be precisely accurate, highly personal, colorful, and ocularly descriptive; and that for sentence style, Gibbon was as good a model as I could bring to mind."

-- Janet Flanner

Commonplace Book

"I'm writing my third autobiography ... the other two were premature."

-- Louis Untermeyer on his 90th birthday

Commonplace Book

"For my part I keep the Commandments. I love my neighbour as my selfe, and to avoid Coveting my neighbour's wife I desire to be coveted by her, which you know is quite another thing."

-- William Congreve, letter, Sept. 27, 1700

Commonplace Book

"Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it."

-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896

Commonplace Book

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

-- Robert Benchley

Commonplace Book

"Well, I hope they understand one another - nobody else would."

-- Wordsworth, 1846 - musing on the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

Commonplace Book

"[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of the brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day."

-- Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, August 2, 1935

Commonplace Book

"You never cut anything out of a book you regret later."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe who was struggling with revisions at the time

Commonplace Book

"William Hazlitt owned that he could not bear young girls; they drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, where he recovered perfect tranquility."

-- Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth, June 26, 1806

Commonplace Book

"Well, Jim, I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell."

-- Nora Joyce to her husband James, 1940

Commonplace Book

"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. Arms and the Man opened on April 21, and when the curtain fell, there were unanimous cheers. Shaw came out to bow, and one man booed. This was Shaw's response

Commonplace Book

"No it is not."

-- Oliver Goldsmith on his deathbed - answering the question if his "mind was at ease" - 1774

Commonplace Book

"Whether children will find anything amusing in it, only time will tell."

-- E.B. White to his editor Cass Canfield about Charlotte's Web

Commonplace Book

"A past master in making nothing happen very slowly."

-- Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein

Commonplace Book

"I woshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25, and now again rather admire him."

-- George Orwell, 1936

A Book of Days for 1931: May 25

Christopher Morley was a journalist and essayist who is probably mainly known for his passion for Sherlock Holmes, but it was a long and fruitful career, he wrote the novel Kitty Foyle, the film version of which gave Ginger Rogers an Academy Award). In 1931, he published "A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure", and I find in him a kindred spirit. He is a collector of quotes as I am, and he kept a commonplace book, as I do. He became fascinated by the calendar itself, and how certain quotes could speak to certain special dates and so he would obsessively arrange his quotes to match up with the calendar. Eventually, a friend of his in publishing got wind of this tendency of Morley's and was so enraptured by it that he brought (as Morley called it) the "private almanac" into print.

I have a copy of it, swiped from an old bookcase upstairs in my parents' house and I love it. It was published in 1931, and there is a quote a day. Now these are not quotes along the lines of "If you love something set it free" (because if they were, I would have to plunge the book into the fire and laugh maniacally as I watched it burn). These are quotes from a diverse group - from DH Lawrence to Emily Dickinson to William Hazlitt to fragments from etiquette books. Some are funny, some are touching. It's a glimpse into an intellectual world far more rigorous than our own, and I find the whole thing quite bracing. I'm also pleased when we overlap (on the rare occasion that we do) - and Morley has chosen I quote that I love. Makes me feel like a smarty-pants, I'll tell you that.

I have posted some of his daily entries before, but I stopped doing it late last fall, as I stopped doing so much else.

I happened to pick up the book today and glanced at today's entry, and the associations it brought up for me came fast and furious. It's about Sable Island, in the Atlantic Ocean - technically it's part of Nova Scotia, but it's far from pretty much anything. It's also known as "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" due to the shoals surrounding it. It has a truly ominous reputation among fishermen, and rightly so. During "the perfect storm" of 1991, which I remember quite well, it is thought that the doomed Andrea Gail (the lobster boat never found) went down around Sable Island. If you look up pictures of that place, it is truly remarkable - a long thin curved strip of sand, like a fingernail ... and there are all kinds of cool facts about it here, if you feel so inclined. I've always been interested in Sable Island, for many reasons - one of them being that a bunch of feral horses live on the island, and I've seen photos of these beasts and maybe it's just me - but when I see stuff like that: feral gorgeous horses running across the sand of Sable Island- it makes me feel like the world is a pretty amazing place, full of wonders and weirdness, and there is just not time enough on the planet for me to learn it all. I come from a state where fishing is one of the most important industries, so Sable Island sort of emanates its power and fear-inducing radius downwards ...

Anyway, so that's what today's "entry" made me think about.

Now that's a "book of days" I can get behind.

MAY 25, 1931, MONDAY

The amount and variety of vegetation on this gigantic sand bar is extraordinary. Besides two kinds of grass, there are wild peas and other plants, affording subsistence to wild ponies and rabbits. There are no other animals o the island, excepting rats that have come ashore from wrecks.

Should vessels run ashore on Sable Island and be in danger, the crews are urged to remain by the ship until assistance can be rendered by the life-saving staff on shore. All attempts to leave in the ship's own boats have resulted in loss of life, but in every case where assistance from the shore has been awaited, the crew has been saved.

-- British Admiralty Sailing Directions, Sable Island

A Book of Days for 1931: December 13

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

DECEMBER 13, SUN. 1931

He was unwilling that I should leave him; and when I looked at my watch, and told him it was twelve o'clock, he cried "What's that to you and me?" and ordered Frank to tell Mrs. Williams that we were coming to drink tea with her, which we did ... he every night drank tea with her, however late it might be, and she always sat up for him. This was not alone a proof of his regard for her, but of his own unwillingness to go into solitude, before that unseasonable hour at which he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose.

-- BOSWELL, Life of Johnson

See why I love this Book of Days? This ain't no "if you love something set it free" compilation.

A Book of Days for 1931: December 12

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

DECEMBER 12, SAT. 1931

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.

-- SIR RICHARD BURTON, The Kasidah

A Book of Days for 1931: December 10

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

DECEMBER 10, THURS. 1931

Hard is his Lot, that here by Fortune plac'd,
Must watch the wild Vicissitudes of Taste;
With ev'ry Meteor of Caprice must play,
And chase the new-blown Bubbles of the Day.
Ah! let not Censure term our Fate our Choice,
The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice.
The Drama's Laws the Drama's Patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live.

-- Prologue spoken by MR. GARRICK, Drury Lane, 1747

I love this one.

A Book of Days for 1931: December 9

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

DECEMBER 9, WED. 1931

Take especial care that thou delight not in wine; for there never was any man that came to honour or preferment that loved it; for it transformeth a man into a beast, decayeth health, poisoneth the breath, destroyeth natural heat, brings a man stomach to an artificial heat, deformeth the face, rotteth the teeth, and maketh a man contemptible.

-- SIR WALTER RALEIGH, Instructions to Posterity

Too late, bro.

A Book of Days for 1931: December 7

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

DECEMBER 7, MON. 1931

Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.

-- JOHN CROWE RANSOM, Winter Remembered

A Book of Days for 1931: November 22

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 22, SUN. 1931

A Gentleman having led a company of children beyond their usual journey, they began to be weary, and joyntly cried to him to carry them; which because of their multitude he could not do, but told them he would provide them horses to ride on. Then cutting little wands out of the hedge as nagges for them, and a great stake as a gelding for himself, thus mounted Phancie put metall into their legs, and they came cheerfully home.

-- THOMAS FULLER, The Holy State (1642)

I love that. That is charming. That's the best thing about this "Book of Days for 1931" book. The entries are unexpected, and not always strictly inspirational (although some are). They are interesting ... a commonplace book published.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 21

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 21, SAT. 1931

He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate. He had a house at Combe, in Surrey, where he had caves made in the earth, in which in summer time he delighted to meditate.

He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon.

He would say, that we Europeans knew not how to governe our women, and that the Turkes were the only people used them wisely.

He kept a pretty young wench to wayte on him, which I guess he made use of for warmth-sake as King David did, and took care of her in his will.

I have heard him say, that after his booke of the Circulation of the Blood came out, that he fell mightily in his practize, and that twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.

-- JOHN AUBREY, Brief Lives

A Book of Days for 1931: November 17

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 17, TUESDAY 1931

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
He who has suffer'd you to impose on him, knows you.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

-- WILLIAM BLAKE, Proverbs of Hell

Oh, Blake, I love you so.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 16

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 16, MONDAY 1931

Words are wise men's counters - they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.

-- HOBBES, Leviathan

Huh, Hobbes?

Chillax, bro. Honestly. Everything's going to be okay.

I might say to you, in the snottiest tone I can imagine, "Pecunia non olet, Hobbes, okay?" although that might be stretching the sentiment.

I also might reply, "This may be your modus operandi but let me play advocatus diaboli and suggest that, Deo volente, velis nolis, Delenda est Carthago."

And then he would look at me like ... I beg your pardon?

Ave atque vale.

A Book of Days for 1931: November 14

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 14, SATURDAY 1931

What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not so muc of America as of the modern era. That growth America must will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real.

-- G. LOWES DICKINSON, Appearances (1914)

A Book of Days for 1931: November 8

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 8, SUNDAY 1931

Non sunt ad coelum elevandae manus nec exorandus aedituus, ut nos ad aurem simulacri, quasi magis exaudiri possimus, admittat. Prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est. Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque nostrorum observator et custos.

[It is vain to raise hands toward heaven or to beg the sexton to admit us to the ear of the image, as though we might thus be heard the better. God is near thee, he is beside thee, he is within thee. The holy spirit lives inside ourselves, observer and guardian of our good and ill.]

-- SENECA, Epistles

A Book of Days for 1931: November 7

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 7, SATURDAY 1931

One day Soshi was walking on the bank of a river with a friend. "How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!" exclaimed Soshi. His friend spake to him thus: "You are not a fish; how do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?" "You are not myself," returned Soshi; "how do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?"

-- OKAKURA KAKUZO, The Book of Tea

You tell 'im, Soshi!

A Book of Days for 1931: November 4

And so, on election day, here is some useful advice.

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 4, WEDNESDAY 1931

Everybody knows that hot rum and water is sovereign for a cold, but perhaps everybody does not know exactly how the remedy should be applied. You must take it in bed; premature consumption merely wastes the good creature. It should be made as hot as you can drink it, not too sweet, but so strong that you sink back at once on the pillow, resigning the glass to the ready hands of a sympathizing bedside attendant, preferably feminine.

-- GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Notes on a Cellar Book

A Book of Days for 1931: November 3

Excerpted from Christopher Morley's A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure:

NOVEMBER 3 TUESDAY

How ruinous a farm hath man taken, in taking himself! How ready is the house every day to fall down, and how is all the ground overspread with weeds, all the body with diseases; where not only every muscle of the flesh, but every bone of the body hath some infirmity; every tooth in our head such a pain as a constant man is afraid of, and yet ashamed of that fear. How dear and how often a rent doth man pay for his farm! He pays twice a day, in double meals, and how little time he hath to raise his rent! Every day is half holiday, half spent in sleep.

-- JOHN DONNE, Devotions (1624)

A Book of Days for 1931 (Christopher Morley)

Christopher Morley was a journalist and essayist who is probably mainly known for his passion for Sherlock Holmes, but it was a long and fruitful career (speaking of Ginger Rogers, he wrote Kitty Foyle, which gave her an Academy Award). In 1931, he published "A Book of Days: Being a Briefcase packed for his own Pleasure", and I find in him a kindred spirit. He is a collector of quotes as I am, and he kept a commonplace book, as I do. He became fascinated by the calendar itself, and how certain quotes could speak to certain special dates and so he would obsessively arrange his quotes to match up with the calendar. Eventually, a friend of his in publishing got wind of this tendency of Morley's and was so enraptured by it that he brought (as Morley called it) the "private almanac" into print.

I have a copy of it, swiped from an old bookcase upstairs in my parents' house (Mum, Dad, if you miss it - just know that I have it) and I love it. It was published in 1931, and there is a quote a day. Now these are not quotes along the lines of "If you love something set it free" (because if they were, I would have to plunge the book into the fire and laugh as I watched it burn). These are quotes from a diverse group - from DH Lawrence to Emily Dickinson to William Hazlitt to fragments from etiquette books. Some are funny, some are touching. It's a glimpse into an intellectual world far more rigorous than our own, and I find the whole thing quite bracing. I'm also pleased when we overlap (on the rare occasion that we do) - and Morley has chosen I quote that I love. Makes me feel like a smarty-pants, I'll tell you that.

His quote for yesterday, November 1:

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.

A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes -
Gone Mr. Bryant's goldenrod,
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves.

Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind.
Thy windy will to bear!

-- EMILY DICKINSON, November

The quote for today, November 2 (to give you an idea of the eclectic nature of the whole thing, I'm in heaven):

Remember the nightingales which sing onely some moneths in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatch'd their egges, as if their mirth were turned into care for their young ones. Yet all the molestations of Marriage are abundantly recompensed with other comforts which God bestoweth on them who make a wise choice of a wife.

-- THOMAS FULLER, The Holy State (1642)

November is my birthday month. It is my month altogether. Dibs on November.

COMMONPLACE BOOK

Member my old commonplace book? Here are a ton more. Many of them are writers either talking about their writing, or commenting on other writers. I feel I should say this: whether or not I agree with the sentiments of the quotes is irrelevant to me. It's the quote ITSELF I am interested in. [For example: I agree with all of the quotes bad-mouthing James. I hate James. But I am also highly interested in the opinions of those who found him brilliant. It's all good to me. It's all part of learning more about life, and writing, and people.] I feel I have to say this because when I've posted such quotes before, some readers get defensive - like: "Hey! I love Henry James!" or whatever - some tiresome remark like that. The quotes are not endorsements one way or the other. I like the quotes because they are a montage of artistic comments ... it's a jigsaw-puzzle of responses, and reading over them make me feel alive. They make me remember my own intellectual curiosity, my own ambitions ... and they make me love (all over again) people who READ. People who inquire, and love, and hate things strongly. This is why I keep those quotes.

My commonplace book is to remind me never to stop questioning, never to think, "There. Now I'm DONE".

It helps keep me in the conversation.

I hope you enjoy the quotes - I hope they make you think, or make you laugh (some very funny ones!!) God bless Oscar Wilde and his wit!

Commonplace

Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?

Thank you!

Thomas Lanier Williams

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933

Commonplace

Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.

-- Charles Dickens, letter to reader, Dec. 27, 1866

Commonplace

Had I been a passionate man ... we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H.M. Minster and she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert.

-- Harold Nicholson, diary entry, Dec. 24, 1933 - on his marriage to Vita Sackville-West

Commonplace

I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.

-- Mark Twain, 1871

Commonplace

The works of [Samuel] Richardson ... are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher.

-- Horace Walpole, 1764

Commonplace

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

-- Heinrich Heine

Commonplace

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-- Emily Dickinson

Commonplace

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

-- James Thurber

Commonplace

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.

-- Willa Cather

Commonplace

I have no more right to the name of a poet than a maker of mousetraps has to that of an engineer.

-- William Cowper

Commonplace

It resembles nothing that I know of, and reminds me of everything I admire.

-- Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way"

Commonplace

Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself.

-- Ford Madox Ford on Jack London, 1916

Commonplace

It is curious how vanity helps keep the successful man and wrecks the failure. In old days half of my strength was my vanity.

-- Oscar Wilde letter to friend following Wilde's release from jail, Nov. 16, 1897

Commonplace

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

-- Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh

Commonplace

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

-- Fran Lebowitz

Commonplace

I don't mind what the opposition say of me, so long as they don't tell the truth.

-- Mark Twain, 1880

Commonplace

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

-- TS Eliot, 1950

Commonplace

Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand ....

-- William Blake, letter to William Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804

Commonplace

It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

-- Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle

Commonplace

Lord Sandwich: "Wilkes, you will die of a pox or the gallows."

John Wilkes: "That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress or your lordship's principles."

Commonplace

To write adequately one must know, above all, how bad are one's first drafts.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Commonplace

I'm a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.

-- Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, Oct. 11, 1917

Commonplace

Some drunk dame told [James Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim said, "Surely you don't by unartificial insemination!"

-- Nunnally Johnson, letter to Groucho Marx, Oct. 9 1961

Commonplace

Thomas Hardy taught me to like Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe taught me about those 'Mimes in the form of God on high, blind prophets that come and go.'

--John Cowper Powys

Commonplace

I'm writing my third autobiography. The other two were premature.

-- Louis Untermeyer, said on his 90th birthday

Commonplace

It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.

-- Albert Camus, Sept. 30, 1937

Commonplace

For my part I keep the Commandments, I love my neighbour as my selfe, and to avoid Coveting my neighbour's wife I desire to be covered by her; which you know is quite another thing.

-- William Congreve, Sept 27, 1700

Commonplace

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

-- Red Smith

Commonplace

Paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

-- Faulkner on his writing requirements

Commonplace

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Commonplace

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.

-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896

Commonplace

[I am working on] a poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades, unless it becomes a bore.

-- Ezra Pound, 1915

Commonplace

I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first.

-- Katherine Anne Porter

Commonplace

I don't play golf, am not a joiner. I vote Democrat, read as much as my eyes will stand, and work at my trade day in and day out. When I can find nothing better to do, I write.

-- William Carlos Williams

Commonplace

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

-- Robert Benchley

Commonplace

The possessor of a brilliant and almost inimitable prose style, and of scarcely any ideas at all.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Sherwood Anderson

Commonplace

The most complete example of human symbiosis I have ever seen.

-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Commonplace

Well, I hope they understand one another - nobody else would.

-- Wordsworth, 1846 - musing on the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

Commonplace

Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual; all of it is myself.

-- James Joyce, letter to Nora, Sept. 7 1909

Commonplace

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and where it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.

-- William Saroyan, preface to "Time of Your Life"

Commonplace

I am earnest, terribly earnest. Carlyle bending over the history of Frederick the Great was a mere trifle, a volatile butterfly, in comparison.

-- Joseph Conrad to critic Edward Garnelt

Commonplace

I am following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

-- Dorothy Parker

Commonplace

The fictional Christophr Robin ... and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms ... In pessimistic moments ... it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders.

-- Christopher Milne, son of AA Milne

Commonplace

The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison.

-- Robert Browning on his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1871

Commonplace

The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.

-- Samuel Pepys, diary, Aug. 12 1665 - during the plague

Commonplace

He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did.

-- Auden on Tennyson

Commonplace

First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry ... Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift.

-- Virginia Woolf on Christina Rossetti, journal entry, Aug 5 1918

Commonplace

I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist.

-- Harold Nicolson after a reading by Auden

Commonplace

[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of the brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.

-- Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935

Commonplace

If I could I would work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.

-- Emily Bronte

Commonplace

He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.

-- Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw

Commonplace

What a commonplace genius he has; or a genius for the commonplace.

-- DH Lawrence on Thomas Hardy, 1928

Commonplace

I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.'

-- Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf

Commonplace

You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe, who was struggling over his revisions of "Of Time and the River"

Commonplace

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.

-- Ernest Hemingway

Commonplace

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

-- James Thurber, 1955

Commonplace

[Henry] James felt buried in America; but he came here to be embalmed.

-- George Bernard Shaw on Henry James becoming a British subject

Commonplace

... this voluble Jack-of-all-Trades ... this carnivorous vegetarian.

-- NY Times critic on George Bernard Shaw, 1898

Commonplace

He is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.

-- Queen Victoria, journal entry - 2 days after the death of Charles Dickens, June 11, 1870

Commonplace

The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.

-- TS Eliot, letter to Groucho Marx, June 3, 1964

Commonplace

A most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affection, and downright nonsense.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

Commonplace

I could readily see in Emerson ... the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.

-- Herman Melville

Commonplace

Her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Jane Austen

Commonplace

A delicious little old dandy ... Much of what he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery.

-- Evelyn Waugh on Max Beerbohm, 1947

Commonplace

... rather ill and rather American ... But by no means to be sniffed at.

-- Lytton Strachey on TS Eliot, May 14, 1919

Commonplace

... a purge, at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

-- Daphne du Maurier on writing a book

Commonplace

I heard TS Eliot read his poems the other night ... He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw.

-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos, May 11, 1933

Commonplace

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

-- James M. Barrie, 1888

Commonplace

It really is most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more ... than an arabesque --- an exquisite arabesque, of course.

-- Lytton Strachey, 1927, on "To the Lighthouse"

Commonplace

Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

-- Nora Joyce, letter to Jimmy, 1940

Commonplace

"Yes, that's a good one, and tomorrow I shall be telling it on the Golden Floor."

-- A.E. Houseman, 1936 - he was on his deathbed, and his doctor told him a dirty joke. This was Houseman's response

Commonplace

"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. "Arms and the Man", opening night - unanimous cheers and hullaballoo - Shaw goes up onto the stage to take his bow. As he does so - ONE man boos. And the quote above was Shaw's response to the boo-er.

Commonplace

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

-- Oscar Wilde

Commonplace

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, and it's splendid.

-- Thornton Wilder on his 70th birthday

Commonplace

Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new, but that is enough.

-- Eudora Welty

Commonplace

I hereby formally bequeath you to the female vagina, which vortex will inevitably receive you with or without my permission.

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to Kip Kiernan - a man he loved who just left him for a woman, August 22, 1940

Commonplace

His abiding complex and the source of much of his misery was that he was not a 6 foot all, extremely handsome and rich duke.

-- Cecil Beaton on Evelyn Waugh

Commonplace

In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good', abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.

-- Bertrand Russell

Commonplace

I don't go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

-- Charles Dickens

Commonplace

Whether children will find anything amusing in it, only time will tell.

-- EB White to his editor Cass Canfield, on the manuscript of "Charlotte's Web"

Commonplace

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him GREAT.

-- Samuel Johnson on Thomas Gray, 1775

Commonplace

For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am lookt upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England.

-- John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 1728 - after "Beggar's Opera" opened

Commonplace

... the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting ... is denied to me.

-- Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen, 1826

Commonplace

If it will satisfy you that I should know you, love you, love you - why then indeed ... You should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher.

-- Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, 1846

Commonplace

The poor little woman of genius! ... I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame ... she wants some Tomkins or other to ... be in love with.

-- William Makepeace Thackeray after reading Charlotte Bronte's "Villette", 1835

Commonplace

From the beginning [Oscar] Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.

-- WH Auden, 1963

Commonplace

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

-- Gene Fowler

Commonplace

[Henry] James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

-- TS Eliot

Commonplace

As I get older, and things get gloomier and more difficult, it is to poets like Horace and Pope that I find myself more and more turning for the kind of refreshment I require.

-- WH Auden, 1969

Commonplace

I want to look like an American Voltaire or Gibbon, but am slowly settling down to be a third-rate Boswell hunting for a Dr. Johnson.

-- Henry Adams

Commonplace

A past master in making nothing happen very slowly.

-- Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein

Commonplace

A cord breaking.
1000 miles away.
Rose.
Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain.
Me. Here. Smoking.

-- Tennessee Williams, journal entry, Marcy 24, 1943

Commonplace

I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.

-- Robert Frost on writing free verse, 1956

Commonplace

I worshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25, and now again rather admire him.

-- George Orwell, 1936

Commonplace

Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else.

-- DH Lawrence, 1925

Commonplace

Horatio Alger wrote the same novel 135 times and never lost his audience.

-- George Juergens

Commonplace

Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.

-- Lord Byron on Sir Walter Scott, journal entry, Jan. 5, 1782

Commonplace

Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united.

-- William Cowper on John Dryden

Commonplace

Customs official: "Anything to declare?"

Oscar Wilde: "Nothing but my genius."

-- perhaps an apocryphal story, from 1882

Commonplace

Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot ... Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.

-- Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, May 1917

Commonplace

I have been reading a good number of biographies this year which I am sure you will commend. Probably you remember how I picked up that volume of Ludwig's Napoleon on the boat and liked it so well that the owner had to ask me for it. I tried to get it at the library but it was out. Instead i got a life of the Kaiser Wilhelm by the same author. Since then I hve read several others of celebrated literary personages. I have one at home now about Shelley, whose poetry I am studying at school. His life is very interesting. He seems to have been the wild, passionate and dissolute type of genius: which makes him very entertaining to read about.

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to his grandfather, Nov. 22, 1928

Commonplace Book

Years ago - in high school - I started keeping a 'commonplace book' - although I had no idea at the time that there was a NAME for it. I just wanted to keep all the quotes I really liked in one place. I called it my quote book. Then much later, I realized that there's a long long tradition of people keeping these "commonplace books" - especially "those guys" that I love so much in the 18th century.

I've shared a ton of those quotes with you all here.

Here are some more. Most of them have to do with Chekhov.

Commonplace Book

An excerpt from an interview with Olympia Dukakis - I absolutely adore this story - I learned a great lesson about tireless script analysis after reading this story the first time - NEVER stop asking questions when you read a script - NEVER assume ANYthing - watch how she analyses her script here:

Something very interesting happened the first time I did Paulina in The Sea Gull. She comes to them in the third act, and says, "Here are the plums for the journey." And when I was researching it I thought, why is she giving him plums for the journey? It always seemed like she was a batty person! And then I began reading what it was like to go on a journey then. There was a long time on the train, it was very difficult, the food was very bad, people would get diarrhea, constipation. And when I read that I knew what it was! Bowel movements! So, I mean, I could play that! That's something that's a private thing, you don't announce it to everyone. I mean, if I came up to you and you were going on a trip and I said, "Here's some Ex-Lax," I wouldn't make a big announcement! I would try to be confidential about it. So that helped me with how the moment should be acted. But even then, I thought the audience doesn't know this, they don't know that that's what plums are about. The line should be prunes! An audience will know prunes.

Now the word in the text is plums, there's no getting around it, the specific literal translation was "plums". At least that's what I was told again and again by Kevin McCarthy. Because Kevin had been in that production with Mira Rostova, he considered himself the big Chekhov expert among us. He didn't think it should be changed. As usual I didn't go up to Nikos [Psacharopoulos] and say, "Listen, I think we should change this, blah blah blah." I just did it one day in rehearsal. Nikos fell over with laughter! … Kevin was apoplectic. But I felt – it's not the specific word, that's true, but this is the spirit of it, this is what's intended, this is what Chekhov wants the audience to know the woman is doing …

Nikos waited till Kevin had given me my scolding and left the room and then he came over and said, "Keep it in."

-- Olympia Dukakis

Commonplace Book

I'm a big fan of chaos. I operate off it in my life and in my acting. One has to have a kind of trust in chaos. I believe, you know, that chaos is a real fact at the center of many things that we think we control and that we think we have the strings on. One of my favorite feelings, before walking on stage, it's something that happens to me only in the theatre: I'll be in the wings, waiting to go on, and there's a sense of – "I have no idea what's going to happen now as I step into the light."

-- Christopher Walken

Commonplace Book

In a Greek play it's not that there is a peculiar kind of delivery, it is that somebody's pain is so great that they cry out: "Oooooooooooh!" rather than "Oh!" … The feeling should be exaggerated in order to meet the form. … Do not try to "show" what you think the play is all about by doing something with your acting that comments on the "form" of the material. Do not try to be poetic with Shakespeare, do not try to be lyrical with Williams, do not try to be expressionistic with Brecht and, please, do not try to be moody with Chekhov!

-- Nikos Psacharopoulos (director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival from 1956 until his death in 1989)

Commonplace Book

The demand is made that the hero and the heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, or running after woman or men, or talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage.

-- Anton Chekhov

Commonplace Book

Describe at least one rehearsal of Three Sisters for me. Isn't there anything which needs adding or subtracting? Are you acting well, my darling? But watch out now! Don't pull a sad face in the first act. Serious, yes, but not sad. People who had long carried a grief within themselves and have become accustomed to it only whistle and frequently withdraw into themselves. So you can often be thoughtfully withdrawn on stage during conversations. Do you see?

-- Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper, Jan. 2, 1901

Additions to my commonplace book

What is a commonplace book? Explanation here.

A collection of quotes, excerpts, poems, etc ... copied out into your own notebook. Thomas Jefferson kept one for his entire life. Most of "those guys" did. I've kept one since I was in high school.

A lot of these quotes you may wonder: "Why on earth did she copy that down?" I have no interest in making an explanation. SOMEONE out there might get "why I copied it down". The quotes should stand alone. If you get something out of them, then that is AWESOME.

Most of these come from one of my favorite sources of quotes: Poems. And not just poems, but poets talking about other poets. All of that will become clear, as you read them.

Feel free to peruse through, comment, what have you. I love all of these commonplaces ... they have a place in my heart.

Commonplace

we are put on earth a little space
that we may learn to bear the beams of love.

-- William Blake ... who may very well be my favorite poet.

Commonplace

"Today, as in all previous times, any man who takes up the arts without other means of existence except the art itself will be forced to start off in the ways of Bohemia ... and for the anxious reader or the timorous bourgeois we must repeat the truth in the form of an axiom: Bohemia is a necessary stage of the artistic life, it is the prologue to the Academy, to the State Hospital, or to the public morgue."

-- Henry Murger, Preface to "Scenes de la vie de Boheme"

Commonplace

We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement. Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything..

-- Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State, responding to Lindbergh's flight across the ocean

Commonplace

"And yet even as I thought the words, I was aware of a strange lack. I could have wished for a companion, to be near me in the starlight, silent and not moving if you like, but ever near and within touch. For there is, after all, a sort of fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."

-- Robert Louis Stevenson. God. That is so what I am looking for, what I yearn for, what I pray for. Fellowship of the kind that is "solitude made perfect".

Commonplace

"Marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police."

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Commonplace

It was Wordsworth's clear line I wanted,
nothing to do with mountains, only the quiet
sunshine and silence, but I hated being alone.
The lonely cannot love solitude.

I wanted a garden outside tall windows,
winter sun in leafless branches, a cold spring
with crocus in the grass, and the first blossom,
and you at work in the same apartment,

my dearest friend.

-- Elaine Feinstein "Companionship"

Commonplace

"He has passed an excellent examination just now in mathematics, exhibiting at times an illustration of that love of precise argument, which seems to him natural."

-- Lewis Carroll's report card, 14 years old

Commonplace

The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.

-- Wordsworth. I believe here he is referring to the artist having to embrace limitations. It is only in the limitations that magic (genie) can occur.

Commonplace

A too-compassionate art is only half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed too-human heart.

-- Adrienne Rich, "At a Bach Concert"

Commonplace

Peace to the bearded corpse.
His last book was his best. His wives loved him.
He saw in the forest something coming, grim,
but did not change his purpose.

-- John Berryman "121st Dream Song" - a poem to Randall Jarrell

Commonplace

After the first death, there is no other.

-- Dylan Thomas

Commonplace

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and becomes one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself."

-- James Baldwin

Commonplace

A shrunken world
Stares from my pages.
What a pellet the authentic is!

-- Donald Davie

Commonplace

"[He is] the most vigorous hater we've ever had in our literature."

-- Edgell Rickword on Jonathan Swift

Commonplace

My whole life
has hung too long upon a partial victory.

-- William Carlos Williams. That one makes me cry.

Commonplace

"I think it is always the first literary crush that is the important one."

-- poet John Ashbery.

Commonplace

"He alters our way of reading for good, if we read him properly."

-- Michael Schmidt on TS Eliot

Commonplace

no soft "if", no "either-or",
Can keep my obdurate male mind
From loving true and flying blind.

-- Robert Graves "Loving True, Flying Blind"

Commonplace

Nightfall is no mere failure of sunlight:
Wait for the green flash, for the exact instant
That your sun plummets into sea;
And breathe no wish -- wishes are born of weakness --
When green, Love's own hilarious tincture
Welcomes the sacred mystagogues of Night:
Owls, planets, dark oracular dreams.

-- Robert Graves, "The Green Flash"

Commonplace

... corruption
Never has been compulsory.

-- Robinson Jeffers

Commonplace

"Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous, and must be left in."

-- Robert Frost

Commonplace

Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

-- WB Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"

Commonplace

We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit
Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun,
Without paying so heavily for it
That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.
I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The gessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere.

-- Charlotte Mew "Madeleine in Church"

Commonplace

"Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first."

-- Ezra Pound on Thomas Hardy's poems.

Commonplace

"A certain provincialism is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up on that crude enthusiams without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done."

-- Thomas Hardy. Take THAT, Mr. Lars von Dipshit Trier!!

Commonplace

Here is what the WONDERFUL Robert Louis Stevenson had to say about meeting Thomas and Emma Hardy:

[He was] a pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife -- ugly is no word for it! -- who said, "Whatever shall we do?" I had never heard a human being say it before.

Commonplace

"I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again."

-- Guy Davenport on Walt Whitman

Commonplace

"I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed, and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould."

-- Herman Melville

Commonplace

I love a life whose plot is simple.

-- Thoreau

Commonplace

"On the bald street breaks the blank day."

-- Tennyson. That has to be one of the most depressing sentences ever written. It makes me FEEL depressed. But it's so perfectly put, so perfectly said. I am including it in the Commonplace book.

Commonplace

An excerpt from Michael Schmidt's great book "LIves of the Poets". I love this.

[William Cullen] Bryant became a big noise in American journalism, a champion of liberal causes, and a catalyst. When [Charles] Dickens arrived in New York, he is reported to have asked on coming down the gangplank, "Where's Bryant?"

Commonplace

"Tell me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?"

-- William Carlos Williams to his friend Robert Lowell. This was asked during Williams' last illness.

Commonplace

Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: "The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom", he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man's beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.

-- Robert Graves

Commonplace

"One song of Burns is of more worth to you than all I could think of for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one's quill ... he talked with Bitches, he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God's spies."

-- John Keats on Robert Burns

Commonplace

"Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot."

-- William Blake

Commonplace

"It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant."

-- TS Eliot on William Blake

Commonplace

"I do not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen, and I have no passion for it."

-- Dr. Johnson on the amazing religiously mystical poet Christopher Smart who spent the majority of his life in a lunatic asylum. Michael Schmidt, author of "Lives of the Poets" says, in regards to Smart, "He has few heirs". I would agree with that. I love Christopher Smart - and yes, I would say that he pretty much stands alone.

Commonplace

From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till declamation roar'd, while passion slept.

-- Ben Jonson

Commonplace

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved.

-- Henry Vaughan - that particular excerpt of poetry always makes me feel like I'm having an out of body experience. I love it.

Commonplace

What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;
Lust is not what the rutting stag knows
It is to take Eve's apple and to lose
The stag's paradisal look:
The love of God comes readily
To those who have most need.

-- C.H. Sisson "A letter to John Donne"

Commonplace

"I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

-- John Dryden on Ben Jonson

Commonplace

"All her poems have written underneath: I have seen it."

-- Randall Jarrell on Elizabeth Bishop.

Commonplace

An excerpt from Michael Schmidt's wonderful book "Lives of the Poets". This excerpt has to do with poet Robert Henryson - from way back when in the annals of English verse:

Being old, he died of diarrhea or flux. When the physician despaired of his cure, an old witch came to the bedside and asked Henryson if he would be made better. She indicated a 'whikey tree' in his orchard and instruced him to walk about it three times, repeating the words: "Whikey tree whikey tree, take away this flux from me." Henryson, too weak to go so far, pointed to an oak table in his room and asked, "Gude dame, I pray ye tell me, if it would not be as well if I repeated thrice these words: Oken burd oken burd garre me shit a hard turd."

Commonplace

"He is a perpetual fountain of good sense; learned in all sciences; and therefore speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows when to leave off; a continence which is practiced by few writers."

-- John Dryden on Chaucer

Commonplace

"No word he wrote in vain."

-- John Skelton on Chaucer

Commonplace

"We all know who our sublime superiors are."

-- poet Derek Walcott

Commonplace

"These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry."

-- Rudyard Kipling on Keats and Coleridge

Commonplace

"Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his voice met with no collateral interruption."

-- William Hazlitt

Commonplace

"You're always having to compete with yourself. They always say, 'It's not as good as Streetcar or Cat [on a Hot Tin Roof]. Of course it's not. At 69 you don't write the kind of play you write at 30. You haven't got the kind of energy you used to have."

-- Tennessee Williams

Commonplace

This is from a review of one of Mary Gaitskill's short story collection:

In "The Wrong Thing", the novella that concludes the collection, Ms. Gaitskill seems to be striving toward an uncertain goal, and (like her narrator, Susan) she isn't entirely successful. She's slightly out of her depth -- which is exactly where she needs to be; it's the only place she's going to make the discoveries that will take her up to the next level and the levels beyond. Once an artist of her command relinquishes enough control to let her brilliance lead her where it wants to, anything is possible.

Commonplace

This is from a letter of Joyce Johnson to Jack Kerouac, April 14, 1957

"I went to hear Miles Davis, who is playing at the Cafe Bohemia in the Village. He's really fine -- beautiful crazy lines floating on top of each other. He stood up very straight and looked stern. The place was packed, but silent as a cathedral -- everybody at the bar looked sad and a little apprehensive and there was a weeping girl with a cat's face wandering back and forth looking for jazz musicians. Then -- all of a sudden, a car smacked up across the street between a house and a lamppost. The people in the front seat were trapped but giggling. A man at the bar cried, "Crazy!", threw up his arms and ran out into the street, followed by everybody except Miles Davis who kept playing. He finished and said quietly, "Thank you for the applause," and walked off. It was like a dream."

More Commonplaces

Here is the explanation of my "Commonplace Book" - which was so popular that I have now made it into its own category on my blog.

I've compiled some more for you, which unfurl out below.

A lot of these have to do with theatre, and with specific actors. You'll see what I mean. After all, I'm show-trash from way way back. It's my main interest!!

Enjoy, everyone.

Commonplace

"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

-- Jack London

Commonplace

"Everything in mathematics does exist now. It's a matter of naming it. The thing doesn't arrive from God in a fixed form: it's a matter of representing it with symbols."

-- Gregory Chudnovsky

Commonplace

"Don't try to suck up or even be nice to your intellectual inferiors. They'll only hate you more for it."

-- William Hazlitt

Commonplace

"Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?"

-- Bing Crosby

Commonplace

Stuff like this makes me MISS Johnny Carson.

Johnny Carson to Fernando Lamas: So, why did you go into movies?

Lamas: Because it was a great way to meet broads.

Pause.

Carson: Nietzsche couldn't have put it more succinctly.

Commonplace

Here's a long quote from Billy Wilder on the genius of Jack Lemmon. Genius indeed.

"Jack Lemmon was my Everyman. And he could do everything, except carry a love interest to the extreme, to kissing and the precoitus thing. That is very difficult, because people could then laugh. He's very good. It's not a fault. It's his quality. He would surprise me too. He would come to the set in the morning, almost all made up, at 8:30 am, on the stage where I am working. He was figuring out how he would do the scene. He was almost made up and he would say, 'Last night, Felicia [his wife] and I were running th elines and a wonderful idea came up.' Then he tells me the idea, and I would go --" [shakes his head] "And he would say, 'I don't like it either.' And he left the stage, finished his makeup, played the scene beautifully, and never brought it up again. He did not force it in his voice, and he did not ask everyone to listen to his great idea which was not all that great. Somebody else would fight me, and I would have to say, 'It's no good, because it leads someplace else.' Not Lemmon. There was a little bit of genius in everything he did."

I just love how quickly Lemmon gave up his great idea. "I don't like it either." That's a class act. No wonder his career lasted forever.

Commonplace

Another great quote from Jack Warner. Billy Wilder tells this anecdote:

"They ran 'Cleopatra' for Jack Warner for the first time when they came back from Egypt, and he looked at it, and finally he said, 'If every person who's in the picture comes to see it, we're gonna break even.'"

Commonplace

I love this one. When "Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway for the first time - the world did not know yet what had hit it. Marlon Brando had arrived. Marlon Brando had been living in cold-water walk-up flats, shacking up with ballerinas, and bongo players, and living a completely bohemian life ... and it took him a while to realize what had happened as well. What "Streetcar" was going to mean. I just love how he describes his moment of realization.

"You can't always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There's an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that's what I was - a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I'm still not. Then, when I was in "Streetcar", and it had been running a couple of months, one night -- dimly, dimly -- I began to hear this roar."

Commonplace

An anecdote about the legendary assholic (and often quite right) David Mamet, written by the great John Lahr.

Mamet once handed [Fred] Zollo a copy of "American Buffalo" to do as a movie. "Have you adapted it for the screen?" Zollo asked. "Adapted it?" said Mamet. "Have I fucking what? I'm going to adapt it right now for you." Mamet demanded the script back. He crosses out 'A Play by David Mamet' and he writes 'A Screenplay by David Mamet'.

Commonplace

"I was a Negro for 23 years. I gave that shit up. No room for advancement."

-- Richard Pryor

Commonplace

The first of three quotes about the magic of Audrey Hepburn - a magic that cannot be replicated! This is a quote from Jim Lipton - dean of the Actors Studio school - my school - Jim Lipton was interviewing Stanley Donen, great director of "Singin' in the Rain" - Donen also directed Hepburn a couple of times.

Lipton: How do you direct Audrey Hepburn and not fall in love with her?
Pause.
Donen: You don't.

Commonplace

Another one about Audrey Hepburn.

"This girl, single-handedly, may make bosoms a thing of the past." -- Billy Wilder

Commonplace

And here's the last quote in re: Audrey Hepburn. I absolutely LOVE this one.

"She's disciplined, like all those ballet dames." -- Humphrey Bogart on Audrey Hepburn

Commonplace

One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say 'Yes to everything' once.

-- Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

Commonplace

I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world.

-- Woody Allen

Commonplace

Rhetorical questions are all accusations. They're very very sneaky accusations.

-- David Mamet

Commonplace

Here's another quote from Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was asked, by an interview, about another so-called "war writer", who thought of himself as Tolstoy:

He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him -- bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. I started out very quiet, and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard, and I beat Mr. deMaupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendahl, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

Commonplace

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

-- William Blake

Commonplace

Johnny Carson got so tired of doing interviews and asking the same questions, that he circulated these pre-chosen "answers" to members of the press - telling them they could insert any of these sentences into their articles, at will.

1. Yes, I did.
2. Not a bit of truth in that rumor.
3. Only twice in my life, both times on Saturday.
4. I can do either, but I prefer the first.
5. No. Kumquats.
6. I can't answer that question.
7. Toads and tarantulas.
8. [My own comment: This is my favorite] Turkestan, Denmark, Chile, and the Komandorskie Islands.
9. As often as possible, but I'm not very good at it yet. I need more practice.
10. It happened to some old friends of mine, and it's a story I'll never forget.

Commonplace

Here is Ernest Hemingway on New York City:

In this town birds fly, but they're not serious about it.

Commonplace

Sending Marlon Brando to acting class was like sending a tiger to jungle school.

-- Stella Adler

Commonplace

I don't know, it seems appropriate:

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

-- Dame Rebecca West

Commonplace Book

Okay, peeps, I've gone a little nuts.

I have been a whirlwind of activity all day - it's been awesome - and I came across my "commonplace book", in doing spring cleaning. My "commonplace book" is just a small notebook filled with quotes, I've kept it for years, adding quotes, excerpts, things I like, whatever. It is a mishmash. 5,000 different kinds of pens are represented.

Recently, I read a biography of Thomas Jefferson and he, like many men of his generation, kept a "Commonplace Book" throughout his life. He had over 10,000 entries. Now that's nuts. But his Commonplace Book has been pored over for significance - it is obvious his concerns, what interests him, when you look at the quotes he excerpted.

So that's what I'm gonna do below.

List out a smattering of the quotes I have in my Commonplace Book. Many of them are quite unexpected.

As will be obvious, they reflect my concerns, my interests: acting, art, literature, poetry, science, the nature of time, etc. Some I wrote down just because I thought they were comical and wanted to remember them. (The Jack Warner quote is an example.)

Some are 4 words long. Other are a couple of paragraphs.

If you have no interest in reading quotes, then just skip today, and I'll see you tomorrow. But I have a bunch of friends (and family) who are "quote-collecters" themselves, and so this is for them.

Maybe you'll find something in here you recognize, or something that will spark some discussion, or something you will want to add to your own Commonplace Book.

I haven't looked through that book in a couple of years. Running into some of these old quotes was like meeting an old friend.

Commonplace

Wallace Stegner was asked whether creative writing can be taught. He gave a two-part answer:

1. It can be done.
2. It can't be done to everybody.

Commonplace

If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!

-- Lewis Carroll, letter to his sister, September, 1893

Commonplace

Marriage is a sort of friendship recognized by the police.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Commonplace

"For more than a year, I read no one else but Thomas Hardy."

-- Auden

Commonplace

Basil Bunting: "I Suggest":

I Suggest:
1. Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus
3. Use spoken words and syntax
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily, but keep shape.
-- Put your poem away till you forget it.
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.
-- Never explain -- your reader is as smart as you.

Commonplace

"I've read T.S. Eliot, of course, but I have to keep away from Eliot or I wouldn't have any individuality of my own."

-- Wallace Stevens

Commonplace

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed --

I, too, am America.

-- Langston Hughes, "I, too"

Commonplace

Never has corruption been compulsory.

-- Robinson Jeffers

Commonplace

This quote from Robert Frost gives me chills:

"Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous, and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in."

Commonplace

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.

-- Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man"

Commonplace

Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written 20 novels first.

-- Ezra Pound on Thomas Hardy's poems

Commonplace

A certain provincialism is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.

-- Thomas Hardy

Commonplace

I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again.

-- Guy Davenport on Walt Whitman

Commonplace

But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt -- a wind to freeze;
Sad patience -- joyous energies;
Humility -- yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audancity -- reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel -- Art.

-- Herman Melville, "Art"

Commonplace

That government is best which governs least ... I quietly declare war with the State after my fashion though I will still make use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases.

-- Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

Commonplace

Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything -- assert nothing.

-- Edgar Allan Poe

Commonplace

Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: "The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom", he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man's beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy.

-- Robert Graves

Commonplace

Imitate him if you dare.

-- Yeats' translation of Jonathan Swift's epitaph

Commonplace

A great writer in any culture changes everything. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce, and Ireland 50 years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and changed.

-- Seamus Heaney

Commonplace

For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.

-- Robert Burns

Commonplace

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

-- Catherine Aird

Commonplace

I was thought to be "stuck up". I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.

-- Bette Davis

Commonplace

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

-- William Blake

Commonplace

I took a workshop with Ellen Burstyn some years ago. It was life-changing, truly. She's an awesome actress, obviously, but she is an astonishing teacher. Anyway, she listed 4 things that you "need to do" in order to act successfully. Now listen closely - because these are also rules that can be applied to any endeavor in life. And it's the LAST rule that is the toughie - it is the LAST rule that very very very few people can achieve.

1. Show up.
2. Pay attention.
3. Tell the truth.
4. Don't be attached to the outcome.

Commonplace

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part makes men petty and vindictive.

-- Somerset Maugham

Commonplace

Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.

-- Jane Austen

Commonplace

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days,
Teach the free man how to praise.

-- Auden, "In Memory of Yeats"

Commonplace

Everything in the universe is subject to change, and everything is right on schedule.

-- I have no idea, but I love it.

Commonplace

The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.

-- Voltaire

HA! I love that. How many blow-hards have you met at parties who tell you everything?? Yawn! It's great advice for a writer, too, obviously.

Commonplace

The following is from Hamlet. Hamlet is a masterpiece, for many reasons, but for actors it is a masterpiece because in it - Hamlet, when addressing the players, and also when running the rehearsal before the show - defines acting perfectly, and gives actors tips to take with them through the ages. You kind of can't go wrong if you follow Hamlet's tips. He can't give you talent, obviously, but at least you can remind yourself not to "saw the air" with your arms, etc. Anyway - in this soliloquy, Hamlet ponders the meaning of acting, the mystery of belief - that an actor has to so completely believe the imaginary circumstances, that real tears will fall, etc. I know this soliloquy by heart.

Is it monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears.

-- Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

My first acting teacher, when one of us would be having trouble connecting to a scene, making it real for ourselves, whatever - all he would say was:

In acting parlance, that means: make it real. Get specific, and make it real.

Commonplace

the absence
of another voice a chance, once more,
to face one's life and live solemnly,
with an eloquence, like a bow being drawn
across a cello the color of God's cigar -
to make, of this scuttle and heartbeat, art.

-- John Updike, "Somewhere"

Commonplace

Develop interest in life as you see it, in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

-- Henry Miller

Commonplace

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies, and brought them into life."

-- Emerson, "Quotation and Originality"

Commonplace

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

-- Anne Frank

Commonplace

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

-- Charles Darwin

Commonplace

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

-- Goya

Commonplace

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: "Great God, grant that twice 2 be not 4."

-- Ivan Sergeyevich Turgeniev

Commonplace

To love our neighbor as ourself is such a fundamental truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.

-- John Locke

Commonplace

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading --
It vexes me to choose another guide.

-- Emily Bronte, "Often Rebuked"

Commonplace

Jack Warner, to his producers: Don't make me any more movies where the people write with feathers.

Commonplace

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in March of 1955. Many people think that that is his best play. Brooks Atkinson, the theatre reviewer at the New York Times had this to say:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the work of a mature observer of men and women and a gifted craftsman. To say that it is the drama of people who refuse to face the truth of life is to suggest a whole school of problem dramatists. But one of the great achievements is the honesty and simplicity of the craftsmanship. It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth. Always a seeker after honesty in his writing, Mr. Williams has not only found a solid part of the truth but found the way to say it with complete honesty. It is not only part of the truth of life: it is the absolute truth of the theatre.

-- Brooks Atkinson, March 25, 1955, NY Times

Commonplace

It is always remarkable when someone sees your soul to a better degree than you see it yourself. You could count the people who see your soul on one hand. Others might know you but they would forget; their knowledge of you was like a weak and undisciplined thing. But that wasn't so with him. He didn't forget. It stuck in his mind. He had seen a kindred soul. he had seen it long ago. She only saw it now. But she was stricken with it. Suddenly she had identified him. There was the man she loved. As a result, she proceeded dementedly to behave as if the opposite were true.

-- Nancy Lemann, "Fiery Pantheon"

Commonplace

The Bolshoi Ballet came to New York for the first time in 1959. John Martin, the NY Times dance critic had this to say:

The impact of the Bolshoi has been overwhelming. And it will be something of a calamity if we ever allow ourselves to recover.

Commonplace

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

-- Czeslaw Milosz, in his Nobel acceptance speech

Commonplace

I believe that mediocrity is self-inflicted and that genius is self-bestowed.

-- Walter Russell

Commonplace

This quote scares me. But I love it.

To change your life: Start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.

-- William James

Commonplace

"I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions, I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot ... and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

-- Michael Jordan

Commonplace

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, make a good tale, and take a good deal of telling anyway.

-- JRR Tolkien

Commonplace

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Conduct of Life"

Commonplace

"An experienced actor knows that words 'I love you' are really a question."

-- Meryl Streep

Commonplace

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Commonplace

"It's simple. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself."

-- Bach, on his Goldberg Variations

Commonplace

I mean that the bells the children
could hear were inside of them.

-- Dylan Thomas, "A Child's Christmas in Wales"

Commonplace

Reporter, to Tennessee Williams: So, Tennessee, how would you define happiness?

Tennessee Williams thought for a moment, and then answered: Insensitivity, I guess.

Commonplace

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

-- Alice Walker

Commonplace

O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

-- WH Auden, "As I walked out one evening"

Commonplace

The long light shakes across the lakes,
and the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

-- Tennyson, "Princess"

Commonplace

The alchemists have a saying, 'Tertium non data': The third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious. No one really knows what effects the change. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a vast plain without any movement at all. We can only guess at what happened.

-- Jeanette Winterson, "Sexing the Cherry"

Commonplace

Speak without emphasizing your words. Leave other people to discover what it is that you have said; and as their minds are slow, you can make your escape in time.

-- Schopenhauer, "Counsels and Maxims"

Commonplace

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

-- Dante, "Divine Comedy - Inferno, Canto I"

Commonplace

She had a nostalgia for a life that she had never led.

-- Nancy Lemann, "Fiery Pantheon"

Commonplace

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

-- Charles Dickens, "Hunted Down"

I just think that that is scary-brilliant.

Commonplace

Learn to pretend there's more than love that matters.

-- The Indigo Girls

Commonplace

This is the final paragraph of one of my favorite books: "The Shipping News". Strange - I rarely cry when a book ends. But I cried when this book was over.

Annie Proulx, "The Shipping News:

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves courting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do ...

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

Commonplace

Half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.

-- Franz Kline

Commonplace

Another very common "anthem" for artists - a letter from Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille. I have actually gotten into impassioned discussions with fellow actors about this letter. It's great fodder.

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille:

There is a vitality, a life force; a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly - to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Commonplace

"If people behaved in the way nations do, they would all be put in straitjackets."

-- Tennessee Williams

Commonplace

This is an excerpt from James Agee's amazing book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

James Agee: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:

Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

Each is intimately connected with the bottom and the extremest reach of time:

Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.

Commonplace

I have no idea who is the author of this next one. When I saw Tori Amos in concert - way before she was hugely famous - I saw her in a very small club - and during the intro to "Silent all these years" - a man spoke, in voiceover, the following words - I was so struck by them that I memorized them, as it happened. I'm nuts like that.

I heard of a man who says words so beautifully
That if he only speaks their name
Women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
It is because I hear a man climb the stairs
And clear his throat outside our door.

Commonplace

Boredom is very important in life. It helps you feel when something is wrong.

-- John Strasberg

Commonplace

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

-- Tom Robbins, "Still Life with Woodpecker"

Commonplace

This is much longer than some of the others. It is by John Patrick Shanley - the great playwright, the screenwriter who brought us "Moonstruck". This is the preface to his play "The Big Funk" - and I don't know any actor or theatre director or playwright who doesn't have this copied down somewhere. Why should be obvious, once you read it. I've memorized the last paragraph from reading the piece so many times.

John Patrick Shanley, his preface to "The Big Funk"

A man in our society is not left alone. Not in the cities. Not in the woods. We msut have commerce with our fellows, and that commerce is difficult and uneasy. I do not understand how to live in this society. I don't get it. Each person has an enormous effect. Call it environmental impact if you like. Where my foot falls, I leave a mark, whether I want to or not. We are linked together, each to each. You can't breathe without taking a breath from somebody else. You can't smile without changing the landscape. And so I ask the question: Why is theatre so ineffectual, unnew, not exciting, fussy, not connected to the thrilling recognition possible in dreams?

It's a question of spirit. My ungainly spirit thrashes around inside me making me feel lumpy and sick. My spirit is this moment dissatisfied with the outward life I inhabit. Why does my outward life not reflect the enormity of the miracle of existence? Why are my eyes blinded with always new scales, my ears stopped with thick chunks of fresh wax, why are my fingers calloused again?

I don't ask these questions lightly. I beat on the stone door of my tomb. I want out! Some days I wake up in a tomb, some days on a grassy mound by a river. Today, I woke up in a tomb. Why does my spirit sometimes retreat into a deathly closet? Perhaps it is not my spirit leading the way at such times, but my body, longing to lie down in marble gloom, and rot away.

Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done. When it's not a safe place, it's abusive to actors and audiences alike. When its safety is used to protect cowards masquerading as heroes, it's a boring travesty. An actor who is truly heroic reveals the divine that passes through him, that aspect of himself that he does not own and cannot control. The control and the artistry of the heroic actor is in service to his soul.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

Don't act for money. You'll start to feel dead and bitter.

Don't act for glory. You'll start to feel dead, fat, and fearful.

We live in an era of enormous cynicism. Do not be fooled.

You can't avoid all the pitfalls. There are lies you must tell. But experience the lie. See it as something dead and unconnected you clutch. And let it go.

Act from the depth of your feeling imagination. Act for celebration, for search, for grieving, for worship, to express that desolate sensation of wandering through the howling wilderness.

Don't worry about Art.

Do these things, and it will be Art.

Commonplace

"The echoes went clearer and further in their dying."

-- Tennyson, "Princess" - I don't know why, I just have always been haunted by that line

Commonplace

Sweet souls around us watch us still,
Press nearer to our side;
Into our thoughts, into our prayers,
With gentle helpings glide.

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Other World"

Commonplace

I must have copied this one down in a bleak moment. But no matter - it still kicks ass. It's by the queen of sonnets - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Commonplace

And Life is grand - and I will say this at the risk of falling from favor with those of you who have appointed yourselves to expect us to say something darker.

-- Camper Van Beethoven

Commonplace

I thought - oh strange and terrible world, you should not be destroyed! There are people whom you can love and who love you - Just let us know, every now and then, what might be an ark.

-- Nicholas Mosley, "Hopeful Monsters"

Commonplace

Exchange from the film "Bull Durham":

Weepy bride: "Do you think I deserve to wear white?"

Annie: "Honey, we all deserve to wear white."

Commonplace

"Acting is like making love: if it's going well, don't ask questions."

-- Rod Steiger

Commonplace

"There's an angel in there."

-- Michelangelo, looking at a huge rough slab of rock

Commonplace

Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

-- EM Forster, "Howards End"

Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. AWESOME.

Commonplace

This line absolutely kills me. It resonates with truth - a very difficult truth.:

For God in cursing gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction.

-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Aurora Leigh"

Commonplace

They had, after all, become artists because there are some things that cannot be said.

-- Rilke

Commonplace

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

-- Richard Bach, "Illusions"

Commonplace

He looked at his own Soul
with a Telescope. What seemed
all irregular, he saw and
shewed to be beautiful
constellations; and he added
to the Consciousness hidden
worlds within worlds.

-- Coleridge

Commonplace

Everything which is of use to mankind is honourable.

-- Dostoevsky, "Crime and Punishment"

Commonplace

Jesus was not shocked by the woman who was ritually unclean, or the man who collected taxes for the Romans, or even the woman taken in adultery. But he was shocked and grieved by hardness of heart.

-- Madeleine L'Engle, "A Stone for a Pillow"

Commonplace

Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as "sitting out there", with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so miniscule an object as an electron, we must shatter the glass.

-- A.J. Wheeler

Commonplace

And she - she would love him forever. And even though he knew it not, surely such love would hover around him all his life like an invisible benediction, not understood but dimly felt, guarding him from ill and keeping from him all things of harm and evil.

-- L.M. Montgomery, "Emily's Quest"

Commonplace

Science takes us to the limit of what we can know about objects: beyond science there is nothing. But this nothing is postulated by science. For how can science be aware of itself except from a standpoint of what is beyond it? Facing this nothing we experience dread: but we also experience rapture, because it is what gives us a sense of our own freedom from the tyranny of things. It also gives us the possibility of being in a knowing relation to things. Without this nothing, we would ourselves be just things.

-- Nicholas Mosley, "Hopeful Monsters" - which may be my favorite novel ever - There will be many more quotes from this book

Commonplace

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows,
which the world knows not; and oftimes
we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Commonplace

The following commonplace came from a novel called "Particles and Luck" - which was not all that outstanding - but this one excerpt stood itself out from the pack. I noticed it immediately, as writing (and thought) highly superior to the rest of the book.

So if you take a pair of protons in the singlet state and shoot them off in opposite directins, they'll both have the same spin. If one is spin down, the other will be spin down. So here's the amazing part. If one of the proton pair is measured here as spin down, the other one will automatically be spin down - no matter if you've waited till it's a million light years away. As if it knows. As if it knows what just happened to the other proton in the pair. At a distance. Reality is not local. Widely separated locations are contagious.

-- Lous B. Jones, "Particles and Luck"

I think I wrote this excerpt down in my Commonplace Book because of one of the members of my triumvirate. We were across the country from one another, but we somehow always knew what the other was up to, doing, thinking, feeling. "Reality is not local".

Commonplace

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

-- Picasso

Jesus, I love that.

Commonplace

When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull's eye is never the fault of the target. To improve your aim - improve yourself.

-- Gilbert Arland

Commonplace

He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.

-- Richard Powers, "Goldbug Variations"

Commonplace

"I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could."

-- Orson Welles

Commonplace

Sometimes you have to lie.

-- Louise Fitzhugh, "Harriet the Spy"

Commonplace

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, who can no longer wonder, can no longer feel amazement is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."

-- Albert Einstein

Commonplace

The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comfort of postponement, of rehearsals.

-- Carol Shields, "The Stone Diaries"

I love that: "damping down our inner weather."

Commonplace

"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics cannot possibly have understood it."

-- Niels Bohr

Commonplace

The Cat. He walked by himself. He went through the wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone.

-- Rudyard Kipling "The Cat That Walked by Himself"

I have often thought that that one excerpt alone explains pretty much everything you need to know about me.

Commonplace

"I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility is a FOOL and a LIAR. To understand is to tremble. I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event."

-- Harold Brodkey

Commonplace

Trouble comes when one retains a static policy in relation to a fluid life.

-- Clifford Odets, "The Time is Ripe"

Commonplace

This quote, from acting guru Stella Adler, never fails to give me chills, and to galvanize me into action. It has nothing to do with acting. It has to do with life.

"It is not that important to know who you are. It is important to know what you do, and then do it like Hercules."

-- Stella Adler

Commonplace

Imagination is more important than knowledge, because with imagination you can change reality.

-- Albert Einstein

Commonplace

This is probably my favorite line from any of Tennessee Williams' plays. It's from his haunting bizarre play Camino Real:

"Make voyages. Attempt them. That's all there is."

-- Tennessee Williams, "Camino Real"

Commonplace

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.

-- Maya Angelou

Commonplace

"In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God."

-- David O'Hara in "Braveheart"

Commonplace

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

-- Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

This may be one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare lines.

A Commonplace

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself,
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)

-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"