Auden called Poe.

After having been driven to distraction by an organ grinder across the street from his Rome apartment, Pietro Mascagni finally politely demonstrated to the man how to operate the instrument less loudly.

Later to find him wearing a sign while performing: Pupil of Mascagni.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Said Gertrude Stein.

It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.

Said T. S. Eliot — re Stein’s prose.

Whistler, intending to show someone a new painting in his studio — who would always step in first and turn every other canvas to the wall.

Jackie Robinson had already played major league baseball for eight years before the Metropolitan Opera saw fit to ask Marian Anderson, then fifty-seven, to become its first black performer.

A full half-century after Marie Curie died from exposure to radiation, the very cookbooks she had once used were found to remain contaminated.

The courtesan Laïs, who once asserted that she knew nothing at all about the alleged wisdom of poets and philosophers — except that they knocked at her door as frequently as anyone else.

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

Said Voltaire.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.

Said Ivy Compton-Burnett.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man.

Said Joyce.

Rilke was raised as a girl — in girl’s clothing — until he started school at the age of seven.

The Rilke who would later devotedly collect lace.

And maintain apartments habitually overflowing with roses.

García Lorca’s ten or eleven months in New York City — during which he apparently did not learn two dozen words of English.

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

Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

What sort of Christian life is this, I should like to know? He hasn’t a drop of love for his children, for me, or for anyone but himself.

Reads a contrasting view from Sofia Tolstoy’s diary.

People speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting.

Where and when has anyone ever seen a natural work of art?

Asked Picasso.

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate.

But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach when hungry.

The very possibly not apocryphal tale that David Hume, always grossly overweight, once went down on one knee to propose marriage — and could not get back up.

Dante walked with a stoop.

Said Boccaccio.

Coleridge fell off horses.

Albert Camus had already purchased a train ticket, between the Vaucluse and Paris, when he made a last-minute decision to accept a ride with Michel Gallimard — which would end in the crash that killed them both.

How many times before his own death twenty-eight years later would René Char recall that Camus and Gallimard had invited him to drive north with them also — but that he had decided their car would be too crowded?

An upstart crow, Robert Greene famously called Shakespeare in 1592.

A pair of crows, Pindar called Simonides and Bacchylides — two millennia earlier.

As Lucian wrote of Helen’s face having launched a thousand ships — 1,400 years before Marlowe.

I am he that aches with amorous love.

Wrote Whitman.

Walter, leave off.

Wrote D. H. Lawrence.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s son Pen slept in her bedroom until her death. When he was twelve.

This man will never accomplish anything.

Said Pope Leo X — of Leonardo da Vinci.

This boy will come to nothing.

Said Freud’s father.

The cave on Salamis where for a time, ca. 410 BC, Euripides lived and wrote.

The ancient clay pot discovered there in 1997 — inscribed with the first six letters of his name.

That scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!

Tchaikovsky’s diary says.

Always give a moment’s pause when happening to remember — that Shakespeare had three brothers.

One of whom was a haberdasher.

The justice Abe Fortas, once doing Pablo Cassals the favor of transporting his cello from San Juan to New York for repairs — And purchasing two adjacent first-class seats for the flight.

Le Douanier Rousseau, contemplating Cézanne’s work for the first time, at a memorial exhibition in 1907:

I could have finished those paintings for him.

Men who do not devote their lives to pursuing wisdom will be reborn as women.

Determined Plato.

People who marry young will have female children.

Determined Aristotle.

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.

Said John Donne’s very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

Modigliani’s repeated insistence that Rembrandt was a Jew.

The possibility that his own mother was a collateral descendant of Spinoza.

Shakespeare’s sister Joan — the only sibling to survive him, and a relatively indigent widow.

Whose welfare he took care to safeguard in his will.

Oliver Goldsmith, who was well-liked by virtually everyone who knew him — and died owing money to all of them.

Was ever a poet so trusted before? asked Samuel Johnson.

As a schoolboy, Luther was once flogged fifteen times in one morning for being unprepared with a conjunction.

Bizet died only three months after the premiere of Carmen — convinced it was an irremediable failure.

Next to the originator of a great sentence is the first quoter of it.

Said Emerson.

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

Said Thucydides.

Depressed at the apparent lack of interest in one of his early still lifes, Matisse visited his dealer to retrieve it, only to learn that it had been purchased after all.

By Picasso.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.

A time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.

Mark Rothko once said.

Rupert Brooke’s obituary in the London Times, at his death in the Aegean in World War I, was written by Winston Churchill.

Dostoievsky’s four years as a convict at hard labor in Siberia — where he lived always in a barracks.

Meaning that for four full years he essentially never had one moment to himself.

He is not writing about something; he is writing something.

Said Samuel Beckett, re Joyce.

He never thinks about something; he thinks something.

Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.

Not bright colors. Good drawing.

Titian said.

The great early nineteenth-century diva Catalani, in retirement in Paris, is told she has an anonymous visitor. At the door, a young woman bows her head in modesty:

Madame, I have come to ask your blessing. My name is Jenny Lind.

Fragonard, ignored and forgotten in later life, but painting nonetheless:

I would paint with my backside if necessary.

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

An even earlier dismayed recognition of Dürer’s, while visiting in Venice in 1506:

Here I am a gentleman — and at home a mere parasite.

We advise no woman to read this book.

Said a first review of Père Goriot.

Truly, young girls and women about to become mothers would do well, if they are wise, to run away from this spectacle.