“His brain is amazingly plump,” Dr. Witelson says. She ought to know.
“What I think is that a shorty book can contain a lot of bullshit, but a long book almost inevitably contains a lot of bullshit.”
Nelson DiMille: pure genius.
All the green-covered books had the word “Biggles” in the title except Spitfire Parade, which I treasured even more than the others, perhaps because you had to know it was about Biggles ??? it was, as I explained to my mother, secret information.
Dostoevsky wrote, “if God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Benjamin Franklin noted, “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others.” Apparently they were both wrong?
Lynne Truss got away with a follow-up on how the country is going to the dogs, so I reckoned I could too.
There is only unauthorized editing whenever a piece of culture is put in front of an audience. The individuals watching in the darkened theater, the family room, or on a computer screen are constantly making choices, skipping over stuff, misinterpreting things, and more. The audience has a mind of its own, and that mind doesn’t care very much about the creator’s intentions.
According to ProQuest and Nexis, the Times published at least 14 bus-plunge stories in 1969, six in 1970, 11 in 1971, 14 in 1972, and 10 in 1973. Their numbers dwindled for much of the rest of the 1970s but came back in 1980, when the paper published eight before they all but vanished from its pages.