William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
Never Seek to Tell
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)
And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"
Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Ballad In Plain D
William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist
Never Seek to Tell
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)
Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress
Afterword to The Dud Avocado (2006)
Context: The Big Personalities weighed in. Soon after its publication Irwin Shaw wrote to me praising it. Terry Southern, calling me "Miss Smarts," said I was "a perfect darling." Gore Vidal phoned one morning saying, "You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go." Ernest Hemingway said to me, "I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speak differently." And then added, "My characters all sound the same because I never listen." All this, and heaven too. Laurence Olivier told me that now that my book was making a lot of money we could elope and I could support us. The Financial Times ran an item which read, "Such and such stock: No dud avocado." Groucho Marx wrote me, "I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado.… If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." When people ask me how autobiographical the book is I say, all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer
Journal (15 May 1824)
Dmitry Yazov (1924–2020) Soviet minister of defence
"Дмитрий Язов рассказал "РГ" о жизни маршала на пенсии" https://rg.ru/2013/12/05/marshal.html (4 December 2013)