“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.”— Groucho Marx A pop culture fixture long before my time, Groucho Marx was still a… Read More
“Recreation means to ‘recreate’ — it’s spiritual. Think about the actual word. It’s fascinating what a beautiful word it is when you look it up in the dictionary.”— Billie Jean King One of the greatest… Read More
“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”— P.J. O’Rourke Swimming first with the counterculture, P.J…. Read More
“The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.”– Joe Orton The playwright Joe Orton said these words during an interview published in… Read More
“One of the things we learn in movies directed by men is what the ‘fantasy woman’ is. What we learn in movies directed by women is what real women are about. I don’t think that… Read More
“I always find there’s a kind of serendipity to research. I’m a generalist, so one of the things that compels me to a story is addressing my own ignorance.”— David Grann I came across this… Read More
One of the biggest stories in the U.K. this weekend is the death of Jenni Murray, who hosted the program Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 for more than three decades. Murray, 75, died March… Read More
“That’s what books are, they’re containers for memory. They’re containers for the stories of the past. It’s an artifact that allows you to communicate with the past… I would imagine most writers have this sense… Read More
“Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.”— Simon Wiesenthal When he died in 2005 at the age of 96, Simon Wiesenthal was the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. A Holocaust survivor liberated from… Read More
“It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.”— A.S. Byatt Antonia Susan Byatt is best known… Read More
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or… Read More
“Saying that men talk about baseball in order to avoid talking about their feelings is the same as saying that women talk about their feelings in order to avoid talking about baseball.”— Deborah Tannen I’m… Read More
“While it’s fun to watch James Bond kick ass, we don’t really identify with him. Most people — myself included — feel overwhelmed by life from time to time. And we can more easily understand… Read More
“To make mistakes is natural, but to go to one’s grave without having understood them is to make life a pointless exercise.”— Susanna Tamaro This bit of wisdom is from the novelist Susanna Tamaro’s Follow… Read More
“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.”— Oliver Herford The quote of the day is about something freelancers will know well. It’s also, alas, a bit of an anachronism. Gifted in multiple ways… Read More