Quotations Weblog

In November, Mark Twain will have a new autobiography on the market. How does a man dead for a century release a new book? I think Dave Kellett of Sheldon Comics explains it best:

If you’re just as interested to see whether Mark Twain uses the words, “horse ploppins” as I am, you can pre-order the book at Amazon here:

• Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 at Amazon.com

We add new quotations to this site every day, and in the process new author pages are added. Despite the size of our collection, many famous people aren’t included here yet. The following are some of the new author pages we added last month:

• Mike Meyers, Canadian-born actor
• Seth Godin, Bestselling author and blogger
• Jimmy Hoffa, Union leader
• Michael Landon, Actor
• Che Guevara, Latin American revolutionary
• Seth MacFarlane, Creator of “Family Guy”
• Denzel Washington, Actor
• Dave Matthews, Musician
• Ernie Kovacs, TV Pioneer
• Tupac Shakur, Rapper
• Stephen Covey, Motivational Writer
• Zach Braff, Actor and director

Since these are new authors to the site, most have few quotations so far, but we’ll continue to expand them. Stay tuned for highlights of the authors we’ve added in July, and as always let us know if we’re missing one of your favorite authors.

Ah… Laurie Anderson. I discovered her in my junior year of high school back in 1986. By then, she was an established experimental artist and I reveled in her music. She didn’t need to make sense or even rhyme, but she did and she did.

So much of my personality can be attributed to her Sharkey. I must have listened to Sharkey’s Night enough times to permanently burn William S. Burroughs‘ voice into my memory. I wanted to be Sharkey so much that I memorized every word she told me he said:

I never owned an album with the song, Language Is A Virus, on it, but I taped it off the radio. Take that, DRM Nazis!

It’s funny how an artist from our youth can be rediscovered and found just as interesting the second time around as the first. It’s amazing how well her music has aged.

John Kenneth Galbraith, an influential economist and writer, died this April of natural causes. He was 97. Galbraith had a long career that ranged from managing inflation as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration during World War II to publishing a number of popular books between 1958 and 1990.

Of course, like everyone else, I knew Galbraith chiefly through his quotations. Here are some of my favorites.

• Economist Urged Using Wealth for Social Needs – LA Times
• Wikipedia biography: John Kenneth Galbraith
• All of our quotations from John Kenneth Galbraith

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) has a bit of a reputation as a bad writer, mostly due to his famous line, “It was a dark and stormy night,” that lives on in endless parodies and even a bad writing contest. Since I’ve written about that before, I should probably mention that Bulwer-Lytton has a few great quotations as well as being the originator of the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Here are a few of my favorites.

• Read all of our Edward Bulwer-Lytton quotations
• Wikipedia biography: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Read Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii at The Literature Page