the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend

From Vanishing Point by David Markson:

"From a Hemingway letter, on T.S. Eliot: 'A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.'"
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"At 37, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stephens' face in a never fully explained fistfight. Stevens was 57 when it happened."

"'As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.' Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941."
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"In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand, including 6,800 registered prostitutes."
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"Not long after Scott Fitzgerald's death, Scribner's let 'The Great Gatsby' go out of print. And then rejected the collection called 'The Crack-Up."
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"No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare's possessions in his will."
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"James Baldwin borrowed money from Marlon Brando with which to finish his first novel."
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"There were 954 booksellers in Paris in 1845."
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"'An uninteresting, and one may almost say, a justly exterminated race,' was how the New York Times described the American Indian in a 1855 review of 'Hiawatha.'"
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"J. Edgar Hoover lived with his mother until her death when he was 43."
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"The first Gauguin ever sold was to Degas."