Be sure and don't move your lips when you read Proust

July 9: Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

Yesterday: French novelist Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

"I think he (Proust) was mentally defective." -- Evelyn Waugh.

Just this one line makes us slightly ill

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this day in 1930. He wrote:

"If you can't make people miserable by writing, what's the point?"

   He’d set out to be a writer, once and for all. Thirty-six years old, turning over a new leaf. He’d sworn off drinking for a while. Sober, industrious as a squirrel, he didn’t answer the door. He ate soup and crackers, potpies, Spam. Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined.  --  Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

Beat from all that typing

American beat writer Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922.

"That's not writing, that's typing." -- Truman Capote, on Kerouac's famous novel, On The Road.

Caught you moving your lips!

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

If you believe you'll have another beer, you won't write anything

Playwright Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes) died on this day in 1984. She wrote:

"If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama."

The lost count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas pere was born July 24, 1802.


"Nobody has read everything of Dumas, not even Dumas himself." -- Anonymous.

No hemming and hawing about it

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899.

"Always ready to lend a helping hand to the one above him." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.

He idolized Hemingway. The writer sits down each day to face eternity, or the lack of it, he intoned. Bullshit, Sully told him. The writer sits down to face a blank page. Maybe that was what was wrong with Hemingway.

"What?” Cutterback said.
“He had to make a rite out of it?”
“A write? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“A rite. A ceremony.”
“He was a great fucking writer,” Cutterback growled.
“Sure he was. Did he even say that?”
“What?”
“What you just said. About eternity.”
“Yes, he did.”
“He’s full of shit, then.”
  --  Chapter 17, The Misforgotten.

This day in hysteria

Edward Gibbon completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on this day in 1787. The six-volume work was the labor of almost 15 years. On the occasion he wrote:


"It was on the ...night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. ... I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom; and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable friend."

In Decline and Fall Gibbon wrote:

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

Better read, then dead

English novelist Daphne du Maurier was born on this day in 1907. She wrote the novel Rebecca. She also wrote:


"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."

All the really acute readers are from Mars

Author Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) was born on this day in 1897 He wrote, in that novel:


"The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth."

While spreading the pain to schoolkids forever

Author Henry James was born on this day in 1843.


"Henry James wrote fiction as if it were a duty -- a very painful duty." -- Oscar Wilde.

Beat from all that typing

American beat writer Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922.

"That's not writing, that's typing." -- Truman Capote, on Kerouac's famous novel, On The Road.

Her stories weren't corny, though

American novelist Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873, in Virginia.


When she was 10 years old, she moved to Nebraska, where she grew up and which she later made the setting of her most famous novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

H. L. Mencken said of her and her books:

"I don't care how well she writes; I don't give a damn what people in Nebraska do."

Today, everybody except me take the day off

Today is I Love to Write Day!

  "Everybody is writing, writing, writing–worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of scribblers—every damn one of us—were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work."  –  Walt Whitman.


"It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all."  –  La Bruyere.

Today's Perverse Verse:

The proliferation of The Blog
Leaves one agog.
From Chicago to Prague,
Like some noxious fog,
It hangs heavy as smog.
It's a World Wide bog,
Through which one can slog
Like a drunken hog,
Until you cry out: Aaaggh!

Write what you know

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901. She died in 2000.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves."  --  Don Marquis.

Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined.

He sent his stuff out, some of it, and when it came back he put it away. He didn’t have time for it; he was too busy writing.  --   Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

Wonder what a Grecian mother earns

Writer William Faulkner died on this date in 1962. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and delivered a famous acceptance speech.  He also wrote the famous line:

"If a writer has to rob his own mother he will not hesistate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

His divorce, of course, had just about put his mother under. It was then that she’d clammed up. There were no more Sunday visits from the three of them. Sully had quit going on Sundays himself. It was just awkward. His mom had lost her enthusiasm for cooking. Did Eleanor and the boy ever go on their own? She’d never said. He’d taken up with Rae Ann but had never introduced her. Then he’d quit Cutterback and started running the route. Drinking, more than ever, filled up his spare time. Then, when he’d quit Cutterback and gone into hibernation, he’d imagined she’d be happy. He’d tried to explain to her that he was writing, like he’d always wanted. Like she’d always wanted, hadn’t she? But why, she’d wanted to know, wouldn’t someone pay him to write?   --  Chapter 41, The Misforgotten.