Sunday, 23 December 2007
Literary quotes of the year
“Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?
Jenny Diski: Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.”
"We want a Ninety-Nine; God how we want it: that shaggy-bark chocolate stick plunged into a mound of air-pumped chalky glop, which would be called vanilla were it not to defame the dark bean . . . You don’t eat ice cream, you gorge on it. Open wide and dream — perhaps of the perfect but as yet unrealised flavour. Mine would be made from the two most mysteriously succulent Edenic fruits I’ve yet eaten, both in the Dominican Republic: the milky-fleshed caimito — a flood of scented flavour, ethereally light; and its opposite, nispero — the unappealingly leathery brown skin concealing a bronze-coloured, honey-tasting flesh.”
Simon Schama celebrates ice cream, Vogue
Norman Mailer to Philip Roth, in queue for the loo before a memorial service: “Phil, sometimes I have to go into a telephone kiosk to pee. You just can’t wait at my age.”
Roth: “I know, it’s the same with me.”
Thought for the day
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed figleaves together, and made themselves aprons. Genesis 3:7