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- 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Much Ado About Nothing
- “I don’t represent anything.” — Liz Phair
- “I don’t really know why, but danger has always been an important thing in my life – to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up.” — William Holden
- “Some syllables are swords.” — Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan
- “To me, music is no joke and it’s not for sale.” — Ian MacKaye
- “All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.” — Charlie Chaplin
- “As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.” — Reed Morano
- “Even though I’m writing about very dark material, it still feels like an escape hatch.” — Olivia Laing
- “It’s just one of the mysteries of filmmaking that sometimes you do something that you don’t even think it’s important, then it turns out to be.” — Lili Horvát
- “Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.” — Joan Acocella
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- sheila on “I don’t really know why, but danger has always been an important thing in my life – to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up.” — William Holden
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- Maddy on “I don’t really know why, but danger has always been an important thing in my life – to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up.” — William Holden
- sheila on “To me, music is no joke and it’s not for sale.” — Ian MacKaye
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- sheila on “For I am of the seed of the WELCH WOMAN and speak the truth from my heart.” — Christopher Smart
- P Nickel on “The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.” — Jean Toomer
- Melissa Sutherland on “For I am of the seed of the WELCH WOMAN and speak the truth from my heart.” — Christopher Smart
- Bryce on The Books: “Nine Stories”- ‘The Laughing Man’ (J.D. Salinger)
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Category Archives: writers
Substack: Interview with author Julia Cooke
Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World comes out at the end of this month and I snagged an advance copy. I fell so in love with the book I reached out to … Continue reading
“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. Books think for me.” — Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb was friends with everyone. He knew Coleridge from childhood, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt (great writer and portrait painter – Hazlitt did the painting above), Lamb met Keats, he was inner circle with these guys. He was different, though. He … Continue reading
“All my work is about uncovering, especially uncovering of voices that speak without governance, or that speak without being heard.” — Seamus Deane
“So broken was my father’s family, that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire … I felt we … Continue reading
“If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.” – Happy Birthday, Brendan Behan
“Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.” – Brendan Behan Brendan Behan, Irish playwright, IRA man, was born in Dublin on this day, 1923. He lived a life … Continue reading
“Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully.” — poet Elizabeth Bishop
“All the intellectuals were communist except me. I’m always very perverse so I went in for T.S. Eliot and Anglo-Catholicism.”– Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop, born on this day, is one of my favorite poets. She didn’t write all that many … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Elizabeth Bishop, Harriet Monroe, Joseph Cornell, Marianne Moore, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Seamus Heaney
13 Comments
“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.” — Charles Dickens
DICKENS MISCELLANIA: QUOTES AND APPRECIATIONS My favorite Dickens? Oliver Twist was my gateway drug. I read it when I was 11. Because I was obsessed with the movie. Tale of Two Cities came next. Read when I was 15 in … Continue reading
“For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth…” — Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine
Maybe this is him. I’m armed with more than complete steel, The justice of my quarrel. — Christopher Marlowe, Lust’s Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4. Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty’s secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born … Continue reading
“Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.” — poet Anne Spencer
Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was yet another poet-librarian, like Dudley Randall, and many others. As the daughter of a librarian, I am always drawn to these particular journeys, since libraries are not just buildings, they are symbols, and librarians … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Anne Spencer, H.L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, poetry
4 Comments
“and I / spoke with tongues that sent their devotees / out of this world!” — poet Melvin B. Tolson
“I, as a black poet, have absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them in the melting-pot idiom of my people. My roots are in Africa, Europe, and America.” – Melvin B. Tolson, 1965 interview It’s … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, poetry
1 Comment
On This Day: February 2, 1882/1922
“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a … Continue reading