"Life is an opera buffa. Leave tragedy to those whose ignorance of life bids them believe it exists."

Die Figur "Da Ponte" (angelehnt an den historischen Lorenzo Da Ponte) im Zwiegespräch mit Henry James (ditto), in:
Anthony Burgess' On Mozart. A Paean for Wolfgang, New York: Ticknor & Fields 1991, p. 91

"There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: “Change My Top Friends,” “View All of My Friends” and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, “Edit Friends.” With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship."

[Christine Rosen: Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism]
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"I love it, you know, to irritate everybody. Ultimately, they're gonna put me against a cellophane wall and shoot me from both sides. The communists and the capitalists. I love it."
--- Billy Wilder

[im Interview mit Michel Ciment, "Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man", zu finden auf der Bonus DVD der neuen Criterion Edition von Wilders Ace In The Hole (1951)]

"Chomsky pronounced that knowledge of grammatical construction constituted the true mastery of a language. 'With a complete list of terminal strings all the basic sentences possible can be worked out.' I am not happy about this. Chinese and Malay do not impose this kind of obligation. Vocabulary is far more important in both than rules of syntax. Grammar has its own fascination and, in a ghostly manner, its own peculiar truth. [...] There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of vocabulary, or lexis, requires before it can become vertebrate and walk the earth. But it is probably unrealistic to stress its importance. It leads us to a world of dreams:

When I corkled the veriduct in morful wurtubs and, prexing the coroflock, chonted the furpool by crerlicoking the fark, I wottled the duneflow by fonking the raketoppled purnlow and then asserticled the prert (in both slonces) through a clariform rarp of werthearkers.

That is good grammar. But it is not anything else."

[Anthony Burgess. A Mouthful of Air. Language and languages, especially English. London: Hutchinson 1992, p. 117-18]

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed...

H.M. - M.D. - Ch. 94
[will jemand raten?]

"A certain man," said Rex, as he turned round the corner with Margot, "once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish -- but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence."

Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In The Dark (1938), Chap.17

Thank you, Sasha Frere-Jones. In seinem New-Yorker-Artikel bringt er das Dilemma des großen dummen Jungen des R&B auf den Punkt:

"Kelly seems to have no superego; he is willing to say anything that occurs to him, no matter how strange he sounds or how self-incriminating it might seem. Many people facing serious criminal charges related to sexual conduct would not include a song called “Sex Planet” on their CD, or, if they did, would probably omit the line about a “trip to planet Uranus.”"

Er schreibt über die (sehr konservative) Lucilius-Ausgabe von Friedrich Marx:

" 'Audacia' is the chief crime which Mr Marx (i, p.cxv) imputes to Mueller [...] But when Mr Marx and his school talk about 'audacia' they do not mean audacity, they mean alteration of the text; and they would be surprised to hear that the fabrication of imaginary contexts [was Housman Marx vorwirft] has any audacity about it. Just as murder is murder no longer if perpetrated by white men on black men or by patriots on kings; just as immorality exists in the relations of the sexes and nowhere else throughout the whole field of human conduct; so a conjecture is audacious when it is based on the letters preserved in a MS., and ceases to be audacious, ceases even to be called a conjecture, when, like these conjectural supplements of Mr Marx's, it is based on nothing at all."

Aus seinem Text "Luciliana" (1907 in The Classical Quarterly); Teilabdruck in:
A.E. Housman. The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose. Edited by John Carter. New York: New Amsterdam 1989, p. 107

MY CUNTRY IS THE YONIVERSE!

(in A.Burgess: Enderby Outside, Pt.2, Ch.1)

Nicht fragen, wo ich's herhab.