Markson Quotes

#1. Death by misadventure sounds like a hopeful possibility.
--Marjorie Branell-Markson

Jennifer A. Girardin

#2. He found he was popular, known for a loose style and an appealing willingness to digress. "We spend most of our time talking about Twin Peaks and The Simpsons so they think I am an okay caballero," he told Markson.

D.T. Max

#3. Please don't complicate the investigation by offering an explanation that might actually be true.
--Marjorie Branell-Markson

Jennifer A. Girardin

#4. In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

Joanna Scott

#5. Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three - and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

David Markson

#6. Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.

David Markson

#7. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

David Markson

#8. I still notice the burned house, mornings, when I walk along the beach. Well, obviously I do not notice the house. What I notice is what remains of the house. One is still prone to think of a house as a house, however, even if there is not remarkably much left of it.

David Markson

#9. The morning's recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

David Markson

#10. Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.

David Markson

#11. Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.

David Markson

#12. Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.

David Markson

#13. Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

David Markson

#14. How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

David Markson

#15. Unquestionably it would have been Mary Magdalene who did the dishes at the Last Supper.
Concluded Marguerite Yourcenar.

David Markson

#16. He had a face roughly the shape and color of a clumsily peeled Idaho potato, and he had a jaw like the end of a cigarette carton.

David Markson

#17. Or was it possibly...nothing more than a read?

David Markson

#18. You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.

David Markson

#19. Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

David Markson

#20. One never does solve what it is about watching fires, really.

David Markson

#21. In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in.

David Markson

#22. Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

David Markson

#23. An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.

David Markson

#24. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

David Markson

#25. Oedipus gouges out his eyes, Jocasta hangs herself, both guiltless; the play has come to a harmonious conclusion. Wrote Schiller.

David Markson

#26. Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name?

David Markson

#27. I like Mr. Dickens' books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray's daughters.

David Markson

#28. Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.

David Markson

#29. Was it Brigid Brophy who gave up on a certain Virginia Woolf novel when she discovered that Woolf believed one needed a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne?

David Markson

#30. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

David Markson

#31. If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt.

David Markson

#32. If one wishes to see a cat badly enough, one will doubtless see one.

David Markson

#33. A simple creature unlettyrde. Julian of Norwich called herself.
The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Echoed Jane Austen - four hundred years afterward.

David Markson

#34. How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one's stomach when hungry.

David Markson

#35. I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

David Markson

#36. Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover ... or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

David Markson

#37. What do any of us ever truly know?

David Markson