January 26th birthday: Eddie Van Halen

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• Kala Sarpa: everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
• Jo Nesbø (b. March 29): “It’s impossible to write anything without being political.”
• Pearl Bailey (b. March 29): “The worst of all frauds is to cheat one’s self.”
• Maxim Gorky (b. March 28): “Science is the intellect of the world, art its soul.”
• Lady Gaga (b. March 28): “I don’t see myself in terms of artifice.”
• Quentin Tarantino (b. March 27): “I was excited about going to jail the first time.”
• Mariah Carey (b. March 27): “I’m not vain, I’m insecure.”
• Steven Tyler (b. March 26): “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”
• Sarah Jessica Parker (b. March 25): “Let your freak flag fly.”
• Harry Houdini (b. March 24): “Don’t bite off red-hot iron unless you have a good set of teeth.”
• Jim Parsons (b. March 24): “Intelligence is sexy until it becomes irritating…”
• Jonathan Ames (b. March 23): “I don’t know what’s more difficult, life or the English language.”
• Joan Crawford (b. March 23): “I need sex for a clear complexion.”
• Gary Oldman (b. March 21): “Women are stronger than men.”
• J.S. Bach (b. March 21): “The aim of music should be the refreshment of the soul.”
• B.F. Skinner (b. March 20): “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”
• Spike Lee (b. March 20): “Parents kill more dreams than anybody…”
• Richard Condon (b. March 18): “Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.”
• Alice Hoffman (b. March 16): “Books may well be the only true magic.”
• Bernardo Bertolucci (b. March 16): “I left the ending ambiguous…”
• Rupert Murdoch (b. March 11): “Big will not beat small anymore…”
• Piet Mondrian (b. March 7th): “The artist is a channel.”
• Shaquille O’Neal (b. March 6th): “I want to be known as The Big Shakespeare.”
• Eva Mendes (b. March 5th): “I’m definitely responsible for the image I put out there…”
• Ralph Ellison (b. March 1st): “Writing requires plunging back into the shadow of the past…”
• Javier Bardem (b. March 1st): “I don’t see this heart-throb thing.”
• Elizabeth George (b. February 26): “I have to know the killer…”
• Chelsea Handler (b. February 25): “I didn’t become a comedian to work this hard.”
• Johnny Winter (b. February 23): “People need the blues.”
• Richard North Patterson (b. February 22): “There’s a wonderful freedom to being a novelist.”
• Anais Nin (b. February 21): “If you don’t cry out or sing, then don’t write.”
• Toni Morrison (b. February 18): “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self… is the test of their power.”
• Michael Jordan (b. February 17): “The game is my wife…”
• Ice-T (b. February 16): “Everybody wants to redeem themselves…”
• Galileo Galilei (b. Feb 15): “Nature is relentless and unchangeable.”
• Carl Bernstein (b. February 14): “Weird, stupid and coarse are becoming cultural norms…”
• Bertolt Brecht (b. February 10): “Unhappy the land in need of heroes.”
• Ashton Kutcher (b. February 7th): “Don’t settle for what life gives you…”
• Alice Cooper (b. February 4th): “Getting drunk & stoned is easy.”
• S.J. Perelman (b. February 1st): “All of us have only one personality.”
• Ronda Rousey (b. February 1st): “I’m scared all the time…”
• Norman Mailer (b. January 31): “Style is character.”
• Justin Timberlake (b. January 31): “I’m completely removed from any hype that comes my way.”
• Vanessa Redgrave (b. January 30): “Integrity is so perishable.”
• Oprah Winfrey (b. January 29): “Be thankful for what you have.”
• Jackson Pollock (b. January 28): “The strangeness will wear off…”
• Sarah McLachlan (b. January 28): “Love large, hurt large.”
• Lewis Carroll (b. January 27): “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (b. January 27): “One must not make oneself cheap…”
• Eddie Van Halen (b. January 26): “They hate you if you’re the same…”
• Ellen DeGeneres (b. January 26): “Find out who you are and be that person.”
• Virginia Woolf (b. January 25): “A woman must have a room of her own to write.”
• Alicia Keys (b. January 25): “Kick boxing is a lot of fun.”
• Edith Wharton (b. January 24): “Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed.”
• John Belushi (b. January 24): “Happiness is not a state to be in all the time.”
• Django Reinhardt (b. January 23): “Jazz attracted me with its instrumental precision…”
• Mariska Hargitay (b. January 23): “You’ve got to kick fear to the side…”
• Michael Hutchence (b. January 22): “To live in a self-made hell of publicity…”
• Sir Francis Bacon (b. January 22): “Imagination was given to man to compensate him…”
• Cat Power (b. January 21): “I got more guts than brains…”
• Jeff Koons (b. January 21): “I try to be a truthful artist…”
• David Lynch (b. January 20): “This whole world is wild at heart…”
• Dolly Parton (b. January 19): “I was the first woman to burn my bra…”
• Janis Joplin (b. January 19): “On stage, I make love to 25,000 people…”
• Cary Grant (b. January 18): “To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you’re impotent.”
• Al Capone (b. January 17): “You can achieve more with a kind word and a gun…”
• Kate Moss (b. January 16): “If I wasn’t a model I would have wanted to be a rock star…”
• Susan Sontag (b. January 16): “None of the rules for becoming more alive is valid…”
• Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart (b. January 15): “I wasn’t neglected enough as a child…”
• Martin Luther King (b. January 15): “Soft-minded men buy spiritual death on the installment plan…”
• January 14th birthday: Faye Dunaway
• Dave Grohl (b. January 14): “My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.”
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus (b. January 13): “If I wrote a book, it would be about hair.”
• Howard Stern (b. January 12): “You’ve got to be a little vicious…”
• Jack London (b. January 12): “You can’t wait for inspiration…”
• Naomi Judd (b. January 11): “A dead end street is a good place to turn around.”
• Mary J. Blige (b. January 11): “You can look at my palm and see the storm coming.”
• George Foreman (b. January 10): “Boxing is like jazz…”
• Rod Stewart (b. January 10): “Instead of getting married again…”
• Jimmy Page (b. January 9th): “My vocation is orchestrating a guitar army.”
• Elvis Presley (b. January 8th): “Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.”
• A Small Glimpse into Bowie’s Legacy
• David Bowie (b. January 8th): “I need to be something more than human.”
• Isaac Asimov (b. January 2nd): “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
• Cuba Gooding Jr. (b. Jan 02): “My mom says don’t open the door to the devil…”
• J. Edgar Hoover (b. Jan 1st): “We are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy…”
• Bo Diddley (b. December 30): “I opened the door for a lot of people…”
• Marianne Faithfull (b. December 29): “Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up…”
• My favorite Christmas toy
• Eddie Vedder (b. December 23): “The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.”
• Ralph Fiennes (b. December 22): “As an actor, there’s a bit of you that wants to be looked at…”
• Andrew Carnegie (b. November 25): “I resolved to stop accumulating…”
• Shelby Foote (b. November 17): “Longevity conquers scandal every time.”
• Want to go back to my place and take some selfies?
• Commies ‘r’ us
• Her teeth were like pearls
• My cup runneth over…
• Back in the saddle again…
• I’ll be right with you as soon as I figure out where I am.
• If you like it then you ought to put a ring on it.
• Chinua Achebe (b. November 16): “My weapon is literature.”
• Bad girl, go to my room.
• When my guitar gently weeps, I give it a hug.
• Roland Barthes (b. November 12): “Language is a skin” & other obsessions
• Neil Young (b. November 12): “I have no other talent…”
• Demi Moore (b. November 11): “I don’t like to take my clothes off.”
• Neil Gaiman (b. November 10): “You get ideas from being bored” & other quotes on writing
• Richard Burton (b. November 10): “An actor is something less than a man…”
• Janet Fitch (b. November 9): “Kill the cliché” & other writing tips
• Anne Sexton (b. November 9): “The feeling after writing a poem is better than sex…”
• Kazuo Ishiguro (b. November 8): “Memory is central for me” & other quotes on writing
• Bonnie Raitt (b. November 8): “Religion is for people scared to go to hell…”
• James Jones (b. November 6): “I write to reach eternity” & other quotes on writing
• Yiyun Li (b. November 4): “One should be able to imagine being somebody else”
• Lee Smith (b. November 1): “We have to pay attention” & other quotes on writing
• Evelyn Waugh (b. October 28): “An artist must be a reactionary” & other quotes on writing
• Jonathan Stroud (b. October 27): “Try different kinds of writing” & other quotes
• Kim Kardashian (b. October 21): “I am so stereotyped…”
• Arthur Rimbaud (b. October 20): “Life is the farce we’re all forced to endure.”
• Marina Lewycka (b. October 12): “Comedy can expose the soul” & other quotes on writing
• Harold Pinter (b. October 10): “Language is a trampoline” & other quotes on writing
• Belva Plain (b. October 9): “Read the best there is and thereby learn.”
• John Lennon (b. October 9): “Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law…”
• Michael Korda (b. October 8): “Finish your first draft and then we’ll talk.”
• William Zinsser (b. October 7): “Writing is a craft not an art” & other quotes on writing
• Simon Cowell (b. October 7): “Ending the animal trade would leave more time to trap popstar wannabes.”
• Clive Barker (b. October 5th): “Horror is the wild-dog genre” & other quotes on writing
• Tommy Lee Jones (b. September 15): “Characters with no integrity are interesting…”
• Roald Dahl (b. September 13): “The life of a writer is absolute hell.”
• Jennifer Hudson (b. September 12): “Don’t block your blessings.”
• D.H. Lawrence (b. September 11): “Tragedy is like strong acid…”
• Colin Firth (b. September 10): “I have a kind of physical neutrality…”
• I like to sleep in Sunday mornings…
• Joe Perry (b. September 10): “I want to be the flame the tribe dances around.”
• Hugh Grant (b. September 9): “Women are frightening.”
• Pink (b. September 8th): “The aggressive side of me comes across…”
• Buddy Holly (b. September 7th): “Death is often referred to as a good career move.”
• It’s always better Manhattan style…
• Amazon book review: Parivartana Yoga
• There are three levels of readership…
• Hail, Atlantis!
• The butcher will see you now.
• And even spinach doesn’t help…
• Bob Newhart (b. September 5th): “Be a child for as long as you can.”