Saul Bellow, always mindful of the possibility of malice extended to a fellow scribbler, once told me that [James] Baldwin's problem was simple: “He wanted to be Martin Luther Queen.”
T.S. "Eliot was the equivalent in literature of Albert Einstein in science in that everyone seemed to know that these men were immensely significant without quite knowing for what."
”Will Rogers, a contemporary of Fields, famously said that he never met a man he didn't like (causing George Jessel to say that he once had a wife who felt the same way, and it turned out to be no bargain)."
When Jean-Paul Sartre wished to meet with him, Solzhenitsyn felt honor-bound to refuse this particularly egregious “useful idiot.”
