Tracing Quotations
William S. Burroughs? Allen Ginsberg? Sam Kashner? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: Prominent authors can be ornery and unforgiving. Apparently, a well-known writer said: Elephants and authors have long, vicious memories. This statement has been attributed to William S. Burroughs, the controversial Beat Generation author of “Naked Lunch”, “The Ticket That Exploded”, and “Junkie”. Would …
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William S. Burroughs? Kenneth Turan? Apocryphal? Question for Quote Investigator: The transgressive Beat Generation author William Burroughs once wrote something like the following: I am not innarested in your horrible disease. I recall reading this many years ago. The word “interested” was deliberately written with the nonstandard spelling “innarested”. Maybe my memory is flawed because …
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William Ralph Inge? William S. Burroughs? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: The following statement has been attributed to two very different people: William Ralph Inge and William S. Burroughs: The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values. Inge was a professor at Cambridge and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. …
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William S. Burroughs? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Pronouncements about the dichotomy of life and death are often somber, serious, and banal. However, William S. Burroughs, the postmodernist author of “Naked Lunch” and “Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict”, apparently crafted the following eccentric statement: No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up …
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Raymond Chandler? James M. Cain? Alan Moore? William S. Burroughs? Larry Niven? Stephen King? Elmore Leonard? William Faulkner? Owen Sheers? Dear Quote Investigator: I have heard the following anecdote told about Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Stephen King, and Elmore Leonard. A journalist once visited the house of a popular author who had sold the …
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