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unearths some literary gems.
From the Writers at Work (Paris Review Interviews) series:
***[E. M. Forster talks about basing characters on real people.]"The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss Schlegels...."[...]INTERVIEWER:Can you say anything about the process of turning a real person into a fictional one?FORSTER:A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work.[...]To ask one and one-half Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself...would have ruined the atmosphere and the book.***[Yonkers dept.]"You can't get it except as the culmination of two hours of development. You can't get it by raising your voice and yelling, suddenly--because it's getting time to get on the train for Yonkers." [Arthur Miller][P.S. A day or two later, "Yonkers" showed up in a crossword puzzle I was doing.]***[Plural "Bloomsburies"! (I.e., members of the Bloomsbury circle.)]"I met...all the Bloomsburies." [Aldous Huxley]***[The quips write themselves on this item.]"My wife typed out the manuscript of Lady Chatterley's Lover for [Lawrence], even though she was a bad typist and had no patience with English spelling." [Huxley]***"[A generation of young writers] were not interesting in poems. They were interested in doing their thing. They did--and that was that." [Archibald MacLeish]***"The French appreciated it as I meant it to be: a combination fairy tale and joke." [Irwin Shaw]***INTERVIEWER: This book also contains another of your favorite characters, doesn't it?KINGSLEY AMIS: Oh yes, George Parrott.***[James Dickey refers to an (unfinished) "lifelong work" by another writer called Death's Jest Book.]***"I must limit [the protagonist of Something Happened] because if he had all my attributes he wouldn't be working for that company, he'd be writing Catch-22." [Joseph Heller]***"I was skating on one galosh." [William Gass]***"Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off." [Gass]***"The only thing [her fictional protagonist] Maria and I have in common is an occasional inflection, which I picked up from her--not vice versa--when I was writing the book." [Joan Didion]***[Leonora Carrington vis-a-vis Mountains dept.]"Emeralds--when you look at them closely--are always disappointing. The green is never blue enough. Ideally, if the green were blue enough you could look into an emerald for the rest of your life." [Didion]***[A sort of meta "Someone Should..." item?]"I keep on thinking of fascinating ideas for books. I ought to think them up for other people to write rather than me." [Stephen Spender]***"A man [at a reading] asked, 'How many movies have been made of your poems?'" [Spender]***"If the poem is to go anywhere it has somehow to develop a subject fairly quickly, even if that subject is a blank shape." [James Merrill]***[Re. feedback from first readers]"So-and-so thinks a passage is obscure? Good--it stays obscure: that'll teach him!" [Merrill]***[On the coining of the "lost generation."]MALCOLM COWLEY: The [garage] proprietor said to Miss Stein, "These young men are no good--they are all a lost generation." Une génération perdue....INTERVIEWER: Is it possible the garageman was referring to "a lost generator"?***"Some of the characters were derived from people living on the farm at the time, so it was a handy place to be. I would come for lunch and they would make remarks I had put in their mouths that morning." [William Maxwell]***INTERVIWER: Do you have an imagined audience?MAY SARTON: It's really one imaginary person.INTERVIWER: Would you talk a little about this imaginary person?SARTON: Well, I don't mean that when I sit down I think, "Oh, there is that imaginary person over there I'm writing for"....***"Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can." [Ionesco]***"You have to wade through some three hundred pages in order to find out who Lady So-and-so's lover was, and then at the end you may guess that it was So-and-so and not What's-his-name." [Borges; and attached is a longer Borges snippet]***"I remember Stravinsky, so tiny, looking up at this enormous giant Sequoia and standing there for a long time in meditation and then turning to me and saying, 'That's serious.'" [Christopher Isherwood]***"I've written lots of stuff that I hate, but there it is, flapping around in the vaults of various motion-picture studios." [Isherwood]***"The notes in music do not denote anything." [Auden; he's simply saying they're not symbols, unlike words, but I like the apparent paradox of note/denote.]***"How marvelous that the essential bifurcation which is man is expressed in trousers that carry Lévi-Strauss's name." [Anthony Burgess, who sees Structuralism as a theoretical bifurcation, and is thus doing an expert-level version of the hackneyed joke whereby the two Levi Strausses are conflated.[Burgess also talks about the "punning chord," which was new to me.]***"I wrote to Shaw who immediately received me and gave me a discourse on how good James's plays would have been if he had written them like Shaw plays." [Leon Edel]***"[Lionel Trilling] returned the paper with a wounding reprimand: 'Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence.' Ever since then, I've made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence." [Cynthia Ozick][Ozick also, apparently, has an idea that writers live in a world of "as if."]***"It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market." [Anita Brookner]***[On the topic of how important it is or is not for a writer to live in New York]"Personal contacts, acquaintances, visibility, all have practical usefulness. But they are not now as absolutely essential as they were then. The principal danger is that, like a character in a radio play who says nothing for a minute or two, you may disappear." [Wallace Stegner]***On Thursday afternoons--when I was on my day off from the Albany Times-Union and waiting for the muse to descend and discovering that it was the muse's day off too....[William Kennedy]***Damon Runyan's style...just leaped out at you and said, "Look at me! I'm a style!" [Kennedy]
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Case of the Canterfell Codicil, by PJ Fitzsimmons:
***Both wings are two stories high and in the Perpendicular Gothic style, so a lot of frightful gargoyles perched on top of vertical beams, looking down on one as if the whole affair is somehow one's fault.***Between the wings is...a granite statue long since worn to a nub by the elements, depicting either George Slaying the Dragon or the Birth of Venus.***"May I offer you my condolences, sir"...."You may, Carnaby, so long as you don't mind me pocketing them for later consumption. I barely knew the man."***very much in the mould of...your Friars Tuck***"We called him Fiddlesticks, for Fairfax."***His aged face...was a pastiche of emotion ranging from insouciance to indifference.***"You look enough alike to be close friends or acquaintances."***"So, how are you holding up?" I asked. "Anything a vacuous young bachelor with little to no life experience can offer in terms of comfort and support?"***"It was a cherished gift," said Laetitia, who had recovered her composure and gathered it into a state of high dudgeon.***"I was referring to the painting, about yay big..." I held my hands up, indicating a rectangle the size of a "yay," whatever that may be.***He put his drink on the table between us, freeing up his hands to fidget independently.***"Mr. Boisjoly," called List Porter, the landlord, with equal parts pomp and circumstance.***Porter occupied the organic centre of a rhizomatic information network, the dichotomy of which was that he somehow knew more and knew it sooner than any of his sources.***"Stick to them like glue, Vickers," I said. "The inspector will be requiring their presence in the conservatory this afternoon, tea-ish. Stick to yourself like glue as well, you will also be required."***I tapped on the door and, sure enough, I was greeted with an amiable "Go away."***Ivor glared at me with an intensity that required his eyebrows to join forces.***
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unearths some literary gems.
From Nymphs and Satires, by Rachel Ferguson:
***
Nearly everyone [in The Scarlet Pimpernel] said "Lud," at least twice--the hero nearly all the time.
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Her voice is like a Transatlantic penny whistle.
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The other sings contralto and deals in ballads which give superfluous advice to Nature [e.g., "sink, O sun"].
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"Where the h-heavenly twins is my dressing-gown?"
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Titles of books, plays, songs and pictures should also be given [in an index] and in italics.
[Some of her examples]
Ay, Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom de.
Lavender, Sweet.
London, Lights of.
Uncle, Tommy Make Room for Your.
***
The sphinx was smiling like Monna Lisa. Things happen like that in Egypt. She was a woman who had lost her nose but never her illusions.
***
[He was] tall, overstrung and upright, more like a grand piano than a grand duke. [But I note that Ferguson has mixed her piano metaphors, i.e., "upright" vs. "grand."]
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Lord Groyneogh Minges-Thynne (pronounced "Greenwich Mean Time")
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Messrs. Glaring and Pillow
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The brilliantly successful author of These Charming Hats, being the guest of the evening, did not turn up at all.
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She is the authoress of those serials of Gripping Human Interest, If, Why?, Yet------, Nothwithstanding and (her latest) Nevertheless.
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What is the use, when Prendergast Pope, who wants your opinion on his latest picture, bids you to his lair, if you cannot throw off with appositeness such words as Rhythm, Middle-Distance, Brushwork, Atmosphere and Values?
***
Though London seethes with the brothers of my parents, not one of them is of the smallest good to me....
I can do nothing with them. They are merely so much cubic uncle. Gladly would I exchange them for a folding camera, pair of zip galoshes or, as they say, "anything useful."
Oh, well....I can't, in sanity, suppose I am the only sufferer from this form of Avunculitis.
***
[spoofing Margot Asquith]
Of my childhood, I remember how the Baron Pumpernickel...once sprang into our play-room and said (addressing myself), "How do you do?" This bon-mot, I am told, went the rounds of the clubs. I became known as The Girl Who Was Asked How She Did.
[...]
Lord Scribblesdull....Dear Scribbly! as we all called him.
[...]
My father was a great wit, a really gifted raconteur. He would keep a whole dinner-table in a roar. Even the sideboard groaned....We called my father "Flopit"--I don't know why.
[...]
I was acting as hostess to Lord Buttonhead.
***
[Bonuses!]
[a short play called "Parrots Sometimes Speak"]
[In a J. M. Barrie spoof, a roster of forest fairies includes one called Spindrift and one called Spendthrift.]
[an outline of a nonexistent farce called You May Telephone from Here]
[a location called Upseyed Down]
["dark hyena" as an apparel color]
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unearths some literary gems.
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Page 14 of 65
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Original Content Copyright © 2026 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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