“If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.”

—Bill Cunningham

Of the original Blue Marble photo, Leonard Shlain had this to say:

“Like a Chinese ideograph, NASA’s photograph of our blue marble conveyed multiple values simultaneously, values more intuitive than rational. The masculine perception of nature and the Earth itself as ‘things’ to be conquered made the space program possible. The photo it generated began to instill in everyone who saw it an understanding that the Earth must be honored, protected, and loved. That many environmentalists are men confirms this change in orientation. NASA’s photograph of the Earth floating in space provided people with ‘the big picture.’ One sees the big picture with the entire retina and the combined hemispheres. The inviting, mute image of the home planet floating in dark space did more to change the consciousness of its residents than the miles of type concerning the subject generated by the world’s writers.”

—Josh Wimmer

Related post: “An Important Lesson.”

—David Ogilvy

(Via Letters of Note.)

—Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

(Via Michael Leddy.)

—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

—Matt Zoller Seitz

—Paul Graham

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Number one, I don’t know. Number two, I don’t care. And number three, the pack always loses against a writer or an artist.

—Chuck Klosterman, “Fail”

“That’s all these critics are saying. Their house is burning and they’re saying, ‘Don’t you have any sense of values, simply telling people about fire when you should be thinking about the serious content, the noble works of the mind?’”

—Marshall McLuhan on his new media-phobic critics

(Via Jay Rosen.)

Cf. The Exact Opposite Is True

(Via.)

MAX
You keep right on talking, honey. I like the way you run me down like that.

—Barrie Chase and Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear (1962)

—G. Bruce Boyer

We went into Sean’s bedroom – and there was a kid there setting up an Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, “Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.” And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color. And then Keith and Kenny used it. Keith had already used it once to make a T-shirt, but Kenny was using it for the first time, and I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who’d helped invent it.

(Via.)

—Joan Didion, “In Bed,” The White Album (1979)

—T. S. Eliot

(Via.)

(Via Nick Wooster.)

—Doyald Young

(Via Brain Pickings.)

—Donald Knuth

—Harlan Ellison reflecting on his time as a college student in The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

—Quentin Crisp

—Geogre Sanders

—Donald Knuth

—Alain De Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

—Jesse Thorn, Fast Company, June 2011

—Jonathan Goldsmith (aka The Most Interesting Man in the World), Outside Magazine, July 2011

—Edwin Land

(Via.)

—Michael Maltzan, No More Play

(Via P. D. Smith.)

—Hal Varian

(Via.)

Related post: Invisible Literature.