What do Charles Bukowski, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edgar Allan Poe have in common? They love cats. Writers and cats go together like salt and pepper, and here are 16 of our favorite pairs.
1. Ernest Hemingway
Via vimeo.com
“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
—Ernest Hemingway
—Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
“One cat just leads to another.”
—Ernest Hemingway
—Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
“when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.
I study theselow
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.
creatures.
they are my
teachers.”
—Charles Bukowski, “My Cats”
“Having a bunch of cats around is good. If
you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better,
because they know that everything is, just as it is. There’s nothing to
get excited about. They just know. They’re saviors. The more cats you
have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live ten
times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and
people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly
ridiculous.”
—Charles Bukowski
—Charles Bukowski
“I write so much because my cat sits on my
lap. She purrs so I don’t want to get up. She’s so much more calming
than my husband.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
—Joyce Carol Oates
“‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Now, you people have
names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so
we don’t need names.’”
—Neil Gaiman, Coraline
—Neil Gaiman, Coraline
“‘Name the different kinds of people,’ said
Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’ Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said.
‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘… Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly.”
—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”
—Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
—Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”
—Doris Lessing, On Cats
—Doris Lessing, On Cats
“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.”
—Mark Twain, Who Is Mark Twain?
—Mark Twain, Who Is Mark Twain?
“I simply can’t resist a cat, particularly a
purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent
things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”
—Mark Twain
—Mark Twain
“And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.”
“‘My young friend,’ I said, ‘if you want to be
a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing
you can do is to keep a pair of cats.’”
—Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
—Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays
“The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.”
—William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside
—William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside
“My relationship with cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance.”
—William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside
—William S. Burroughs, The Cat Inside
Via culturalcat.com
12. Edgar Allan Poe
Poe at work under Catalina’s
eye (litho), Sheldon, Charles Mills (1866-1928) / Private Collection / ©
Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library
“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
—Edgar Allan Poe
“How absurd these words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way.”
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
“When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it and wait until the wind changes.”
—T. S. Eliot
—T. S. Eliot
“Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the
pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden
twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are
really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the
food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The
next thing he’ll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of
them will sell.”
—Philip K. Dick
—Philip K. Dick
“You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “To a Cat”of a place bounded like a dream.”
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