Oscar Wilde
Thomas Hardy, from Jude the Obscure
Dashiell Hammett, from The Maltese Falcon
Delmore Schwartz, from poem of the same name
Mark Twain
Sarah Vowell, from the story "Mix Tape" in Take the Cannoli
Seamus Heany, first two lines of the poem "Digging"
David Remnick, from "Reporting It All: A. J. Liebling at one hundred" published in the March 29, 2004 New Yorker: "Liebling so enjoyed himself at the offices of The New Yorker, where he worked for twenty-eight years, that he could be heard humming and snorting with laughter as he pulled the sheets from his typewriter and read them over. He knocked himself out, if he did say so himself."
Michael Almereyda, interviewed in the April 18, 2004 New York Times about his movie, "This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs 'The Late Henry Moss.'"
Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse
Archilochos, trans. Guy Davenport
The poem in its entirety:
My ash spear is my barley bread,
My ash spear is my Ismarian wine.
I lean on my spear and drink.
John Berryman, from the poem "Damned" in Love & Fame
George Carlin
W. Somerset Maugham, from Of Human Bondage
Rita Rudner
Will Rogers
Miles Davis
Bertrand Russell
Steven Wright
James Thurber
Confucius
Dave Barry
Peter DeVries
Winston Churchill
Douglas Adams
W. H. Auden
Fran Leibowitz
Henry Sambrooke Leigh
William Cowper
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Clarence Darrow
Robert Orben
Erica Jong
Pearl Bailey
Abraham Lincoln
Peter Ustinov