My Favorite Words: A rose is a rose is a rose.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Salvador Dalí
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My Favorite Words: In theory...

Gravity is the thermodynamic limit of the statistical mechanics of 'atoms of space-time.'

Thanu Padmanabhan
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On Writing: Rise & Fall

To wish oneself into another's glory ... is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however--to let your hero's life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy ... but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall--well, that's worth thinking about.

Philip Roth
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My Favorite Words: Moral Relativism

Les actions et les pensées des hommes vous apparaissent comme des cas particuliers de la mécanique universelle, vous n'en concevez ni colère ni haine. Mais il y a des choses qui vous dégoûtent; vous avez de la délicatesse, et il est bien vrai que la morale est an affaire de goût.

Anatole France
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That Thing of the Poets: Marina

Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t'have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploghs air.

George Chapman
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My Favorite Words: Les Philosophes

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead
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My Favorite Words

Folly is the child of Power... The power to command frequently causes failure to think; the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.

Barbara Tuchman
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On Writing

My subject in fiction is the action of Grace in a territory largely held by the Devil.

Flannery O'Connor
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Prozac or Pro-sack?

In most cases, depression is not a mental illness. It's a sane response to a crazy world.

Gary Greenberg
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The Mass-Culture Conundrum

"Mass culture is a machine for showing desire."

Roland Barthes

... "It's also a machine for expressing resentment, a frustration of desire."

David Denby
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On Writing: Kitsch

Conventional novelists sometimes produce what Harold Rosemberg called fifty years ago "kitsch," the following of established rules at a time when artists are calling those rules into question.

James Wood
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Oh, Academia!

Dig an academic slit trench so deep and so narrow that there is room only for you.

Reported by Robert R. Provine
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Obituarium: Farewell, Mylord, Knight

Dick Francis - R.I.P. Feb. 18, 2010
In Memorian:

Not to read Dick Francis because you don't like horses is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don't like God.

John Leonard
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On History: The Democratic Making of a Kingdom

It was not England who made Parliament, but Parliament that made England.

G.M. Trevelyan
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My Favorite Words: Music to My Ears!

I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn't know how my music sounds.

Duke Ellington
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My Favorite Words: Practical Aesthetics

The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect apropriateness to its use.

Gustave Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel!)
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My Favorite Words: Just Kidding!

"Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but, can a joke ever be "only a joke?".

Attributed to Sigmund Freud.
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On Writing

Good descriptions have a long shelf life.

Robert R Provine
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What is there to laugh about?

Laughter... can be regarded as an aesthetically and sonically impoverished "human song."

Robert R. Provine
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What is there to laugh about?

Laughing is, in essence, a movement that produces song.

Robert R. Provine
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What is there to laugh about?

Hobbes states that laughter is the expression of a "sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminence in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly." (Hobbes´s On Human Nature)

Robert R. Provine
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My Favorite Words: On The Cinema

Delante de la pantalla, todo. Detrás de la pantalla, nada.

Manuel Puig
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On Writing

La escritura no es otra cosa que una tentativa de captar la voz a pleno vuelo.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Paráfrasis)
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My Favorite Words: La France!

France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

Mark Twain
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My Favorite Words: Revolution

No doubt their pristine sense of undisturbed somnolence will again settle upon them.

James McNeill Whistler
(when leaving the Presidency of the Society of British Artists)
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My Favorite Words: Material World

My God, money questions are terrible for an artist!

Paul Gauguin
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My Favorite Words: Lutece

Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.

Thomas Gold Appleton
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