TV Quote of the Day (‘Seinfeld,’ As George Doesn’t Take Well to a Breakup)

[George’s girlfriend Gwen announces she’s breaking up with him. George suspects it’s because she saw him on TV pigging out on a hot-fudge sundae at a tennis game.]

Gwen [played by Linda Kash] [disputing his reasoning]: “It's not you. It's me.”

George Costanza [played by Jason Alexander]: “You're giving me the ‘it's not you, it’s me’ routine? I invented ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ Nobody tells me it’s them, not me. If it’s anybody, it’s me.”

Gwen [fast tiring of this]: “All right, George, it's you.”

George: “You're damn right it's me!”—Seinfeld, Season 5, Episode 6, "The Lip Reader,” original air date Oct. 28, 1993, teleplay by Carol Leifer, directed by Tom Cherones

 

Quote of the Day (Peter James, With Advice for Beginning Authors)

“The two best pieces of advice I can give are: Firstly, read, read, read the biggest-selling books in the genre you want to write, and deconstruct them—literally dissect them—to analyze what made then work, what kept you hooked, what made you want to follow the characters. Writing is a craft, at one level—if you were going to be a doctor, as a medical student you would be given a cadaver to dissect, to learn how it all worked. If you wanted to be a car mechanic, you would take apart a car and its engine to see how they work. The second piece of advice is: love your characters—even the bad guys. That was terrific advice I was once given. If you think back on many of the most enduring villains in literature, they have something about them that makes you them. Frankenstein’s monster, telling the doctor that he didn’t want to exist—the doctor created him! Dracula: a monster, but charismatic and charming. Hannibal Lecter—a monster, but we like him, so we engage and, in a strange way, care for him.”—Mystery novelist Peter James, quoted by Andrew J. Gulli, “Interview: Peter James,” The Strand Magazine, Issue XXXVI (2025)

Photo of the Day: Saddle River County Park, Fair Lawn NJ

I took the image accompanying this post yesterday while soaking in the sun. 

Though I entered Saddle River County Park from Fair Lawn, that’s not the only suburb encompassed by its 577 acres. It also runs through five other Bergen County towns: Glen Rock, Paramus, Ridgewood, Rochelle Park, and Saddle Brook.

I can never get enough of bodies of water, and though the crisp air may have kept more people from venturing outside, I was happy to take the path around this pond without bumping into crowds.

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on a Fearful People ‘Possessed With Rumors’)

“But as I traveled hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied,
Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John (1594-6), Act 4, Scene 3 

William Shakespeare died on this day in 1616 at age 52, but his influence reverberates to this day.

Following decades of Tudor authoritarianism, Shakespeare knew that it was safer to project his insights into distant times (King John’s death predated the playwright’s by four centuries) and even distant lands (in the case of The Tempest, a small, remote island in the Mediterranean).

His history play King John is one of his thornier and less performed works, but such was The Bard’s genius that even in this passage from the play, he served as a profound analyst of how corruption and tyranny at the highest government levels lead inevitably to rampant conspiracy theories and contagious fear.

Quote of the Day (Langston Hughes, on the ‘Little Sleep Song’ of April Rain)

“The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.”—African-American poet, librettist, translator, and fiction writer Langston Hughes (1901-1967), “April Rain Song,” originally published in 1921, reprinted in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1994)
 
I had a somewhat different reaction to overnight rain than Langston Hughes did: I awoke to hear its soft patter outside my window this morning, rather than falling asleep to it.
 
But I recalled that I had just heard yesterday about this poem. It’s a lovely set of verses (only five more lines than you see here) and easy to find on the Internet. I urge anyone who’s never encountered it to look it up.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Holland, on Musical Echoes)

“Creating music indoors is like throwing a number of balls around a four-sided handball court and waiting for them to come back to you. If the balls are of different sizes and thrown at different speeds, your ears, so to speak, will have their hands full.”—American music critic Bernard Holland, “How's That Again? An Echoing Refrain,” The New York Times, Dec. 20, 2025

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Stranger Than Paradise,’ As A Hungarian Teen Learns About ‘The Way We Eat in America’)

Willie [played by John Lurie]: “You're sure you don't want a TV dinner?”

Eva [played by Eszter Balint]: “Yes. I'm not hungry. Why is it called ‘TV dinner’?”

Willie: “Um... You're supposed to eat it while you watch TV. Television.”

Eva: “I know what a TV is. Where does that meat come from?”:

Willie: “What do you mean?”

Eva: “What does that meat come from?”

Willie: “I guess it comes from a cow.”

Eva: “From a cow? It doesn't even look like meat.”

Willie: “Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don't even have to wash the dishes.”— Stranger Than Paradise (1984), screenplay by Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie, directed by Jim Jarmusch