literature

Would you rather share your dinner table with Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, or me?*     *Don\’t want to influence your decision but bear in mind that the other two are dead.

I used to quote the words of wise people all the time. But now? Bugger it, let them quote me.

A nice pensee from Virginia Woolf, recently come across – \”A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand\”.

Rewatching remastered Fawlty Towers and it was suddenly clear – Fawlty Towers is Steptoe and Son. Yes, ok, moved from a junkyard in London to a hotel in Torquay, but otherwise the same. Oh, and both tragedies of course, not comedies. How did I not see this 40 years ago?

Still don\’t know what I am doing here on this blog. I can\’t write for people, and I can\’t write not for people. The long gap is a problem too. Obviously writing is like riding a bike, you never forget how. When I say \”like\” of course, I mean trying to ride a bike after

These Pensees, I was thinking, will be something of the style of Samuel Johnson (another man with whom I have nothing in common, except, perhaps, the strong tendency to be a smartarse), e.g. \”An odd thought strikes me: we shall receive no letters in the grave\”.