“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them."

 "I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

I can always count on Mark Twain to make me smile!

Feedback on one's work is sometimes hard to take. Partly because the feedback doesn't very often dwell on the bits that the reviewers like (if any) but only the bits that they want to chew up and spit out...and also because it can show a very limited understanding of what one is (I am!) trying to achieve...

So I've written, following the brief (I think) a quite poignant and gritty drama. I get this feedback: "There is not much humour in it. We think it should start with a joke."

 Oh how I laughed!

But I'm a professional writer. I can take it. I can rewrite according to their wishes.

I'd hate to think that my skull was in danger of being beaten with my own shin bone...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails.

I think, if there is one person above all persons whose quotes I've quoted that mean more to me than any other quotes, it's...

Mark Twain.

And there I was thinking that all he did was write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

So - yesterday, for most of the day, I was completely lacking in energy, drained, at a loss to work out how I could make myself feel any different.

My temptation was to crash out. I tried it for a bit but I didn't feel any better.

Another of life's perversities...

The best thing to do when you're feeling totally wiped out and without the energy to take any actions is to take some actions.

from fiber mixed media

 So I did, and instantly I felt about 103% better and full of vim and vigour.

Life, eh?

In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase...

"...and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy."

Bizarrely, no images of melting door-knobs, still less mushy ones, are to be found. ANYWHERE. So here instead is a painting of a door-knob at room temperature. British room temperature, that is.

by Leyla Munteanu

The quote is from Mark Twain and made me laugh out loud so I had to use it today, specially for my friend in Bombay, Rusty Irani, blogger about films extraordinaire, brilliant screenplay writer, especially in the Western genre (Western as in cowboys, not as in...as opposed to Eastern)...

 ...and very good friend.


Our snow here is melting, almost as quickly as it arrived. Shame!

We are left with mushy slush. Neither pretty nor any use to man or beast.

Slush ranks second only to sleet on my weather hit list...if you're at all interested...