Thursday 21 November 2013

Even Commoner II

Another commonplace posting, as pioneered by @deniswright

"There are two ways of getting home; one of them is to stay there."
GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

"Think of an idea and then force yourself to write it."
Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver, complaining that she is supposed to give a one-hour talk on writing and doesn't know how to fill the remaining 59 minutes, once she's stated the above.

"It's what they're always about: selling teenage virginity for cash and crenellations. The most astute deconstruction of every plot nuance and character trait in the Austen ... novel can be found in Noel Edmonds's Deal or No Deal?"
AA Gill on Sense and Sensibility

Marianne Moore: "To me theatre is the most pleasant, in fact my favourite, form of recreation."
Interviewer: " Do you go often?"
Marianne Moore: "No. Never."
From an interview with the poet Marianne Moore in Paris Review.


4 comments:

  1. Mr. Gill sounds a bit like Thackeray on orange blossoms, somewhere midway through Vanity Fair. I would say, however, that the English fiction from early on had a lively interest in marriage in its relation to property--see Fielding and Smollett.

    And by Gill's formula, one could say that the Iliad is about the use of teenage female sexuality, at one's service by pillage, and about killing other men with edged weapons in pursuit of the same. Yet we read Homer, and we read Austen. How many bad poems or novels of war have been forgotten since Homer, and how many bad novels of marriage since Austen?

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  2. You're right, I know - and he's a cad & so on, but sometimes his perspective, misguided as it is, makes me laugh.

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  3. Most of A.A. Gill's statements can be accurately refuted with the following sentence: "That is not true."

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