Quote of the Week, #3

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." James Branch Cabell

Quote of the Day #2

"Life is an overrated way of passing the time."

Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Afraid Of (2008)

Quote of the Day #1

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstacy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you're a writer.

Who wrote it? (The picture's a clue!)

Hubert Selby Jr. - quote of the day!

"The responsibility of the artist is to transcend the human ego." Hubert Selby, Jr.

Hubert Selby Jr. wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream, both made into decent movies. I just finished watching the documentary of his fascinating life, "Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow" (2005). He goes from tough kid / only child in Brooklyn, skipping school, to a merchant seaman who contracted a terrible disease from the cattle being transported to Europe at sea in World War II, to spending years in a hospital, having a lung removed, becoming a heroin abuser for the pain after getting hooked on morphine, drying out and quitting booze at 40, then surprising everyone and living for another thirty years (and writing some amazing and pretty dark fiction).

---

Enough said!

Here's the last thing Hubert 'Cubby' Selby, Jr. wrote:

---

A List of Indignities

Birth
Death