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2. Charles Bukowski



Via grandchild-of-bukowski.tumblr.com


“when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.

I study these
creatures.

they are my
teachers.”

—Charles Bukowski, “My Cats”



Via yourcatwasdelicious.tumblr.com


“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

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4. Neil Gaiman



journal.neilgaiman.com


“‘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.tumblr.com


“‘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

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6. Ray Bradbury



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“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



ralphnelson.com

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8. Mark Twain



Via dumpaday.com


“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.”
—Mark Twain, Who Is Mark Twain?



bancroft.berkeley.edu


“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

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10. Aldous Huxley



Via yourcatwasdelicious.tumblr.com


“‘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

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12. Edgar Allan Poe



bridgemanart.com
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

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14. T. S. Eliot


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkLgtusza4#
eliotsociety.org.uk
The Naming of Cats in T S Eliot's own voice


“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

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16. Jorge Luis Borges



Via imgur.com


“You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, “To a Cat”



Via pasolininuc.blogspot.com


by HarperCollins
BuzzFeed User
http://www.buzzfeed.com/

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Stephen King



Via writersandkitties.tumblr.com


Horror, fantasy, and science-fiction author Stephen King has written 49 novels, nine collections of short stories, and five non-fiction books. He is also well-known for the many films based on his work, including The Shining, Stand By Me, and Pet Semetary. Despite once writing in a short story that “it might be that the biggest division in the world isn’t men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs,” it seems that the King family does in fact keep both cats and dogs as pets. Note that the cat in these (awesome) photos is wearing a name tag that reads “Clovis,” the name used in King’s screenplay Sleepwalkers for a cat who [spoilers] saves the day.



Via writersandkitties.tumblr.com


“Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.”
- Stephen King, Pet Semetary

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Jack Kerouac



Via posterrevolution.com


Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, was a poet and novelist who was a pioneer of the “beat generation” and was famous for his spontaneous, free-flowing style and autobiographical honesty. He was an underground celebrity during his tragically short life (he died at age 47 of internal bleeding due to alcohol abuse), and has been a hero to teenagers and iconoclasts ever since.



writersandkitties.tumblr.com


Jack also loved cats, especially his cat Tyke, whose unfortunate passing he wrote about in loving detail in his memoir Big Sur.


“The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto at his City Lights bookstore and he’s smiling and glad to see me, says ‘We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited,’ but there something else in his expression — When we’re alone he says, ‘Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead.’

Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother — I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand and with his little head hanging down, or just purring for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting — He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold that big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he’d just purr, he had complete confidence in me — and when I’d left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I’d carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me ‘Attends pour mue kitigingoo’ — But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT.”



Via drfitzmonster.tumblr.com


“Holding up my
purring cat to the moon
I sighed.”

- Jack Kerouac, American Haiku, 1959

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Edith Södergran



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Edith Södergran was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet, and one of the first modernists in Swedish literature. Edith was just 24 when she released her first collection of poems, Dikter. She died at age 31 after complications from the tuberculosis she contracted as a teenager.

“Of all our sunny world
I wish only for a garden sofa
where a cat is sunning itself.

There I should sit
with a letter at my breast,
a single small letter.
That is what my dream looks like.”

- Edith Södergran, A Wish, translated by David McDuff



A photo by Edith, of her beloved cats. Via polarbearstale.blogspot.com



In Ozero Roshino, Russia, where she spent her summers, stands a monument to Södergran’s favorite cat Totti. Via members.virtualtourist.com



nordicwomensliterature.net


“I have a luck cat in my arms,
it spins threads of luck.
Luck cat, luck cat,
make for me three things:
make for me a golden ring,
to tell me that I am lucky;
make for me a mirror
to tell me that I am beautiful;
make for me a fan
to waft away my cumbersome thoughts.
Luck cat, luck cat,
spin for me some news of my future!”

- Edith Södergran, Luck Cat, translated by David McDuff

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Colette



Via certosino.wordpress.com


Colette was a French novelist, most famous for her novel Gigi, which was adapted even more famously for stage and screen. She was also notoriously sensuous, having numerous affairs with both women and men, including her second husband’s son. She also “discovered” Audrey Hepburn when she cast the then unknown actress on sight to play the lead in Gigi after she saw her walking across the lobby of a hotel.

She has also been described as “the original Cat Woman,” and had a lifelong love affair with cats. She also loved dogs, after growing up surrounded by animals brought to the house by her mother, who “boasted of her ability to housebreak pets and children.” Colette wrote a novel entitled “The Cat,” which is about the engagement and honeymoon of a couple who is divided over the man’s helpless devotion to his cat, Saha. Colette’s cat lover, Alain, muses in the book “It wasn’t just a little cat I was carrying at that moment,” Alain mused. “It was the incarnate nobility of the whole cat race, her limitless indifference, her tact, her bond of union with the human aristocrat.”



writersandkitties.tumblr.com


“There are no ordinary cats.”

- Colette



writersandkitties.tumblr.com


“My cat does not talk as respectfully to me as I do to her.”

- Colette

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William Carlos Williams



writersandkitties.tumblr.com


Poet and doctor William Carlos Williams “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician,” but miraculously managed both. He began as a member of the Imagist movement, a group of poets in the early 20th century who were devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.” Later, he experimented with new techniques and influences, eventually settling on a unique personal style that centered on the daily life of ‘common’ people.

“Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.”

- William Carlos Williams



Via yourcatwasdelicious.tumblr.com


“As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot”

-William Carlos Williams, Poem (As the cat)

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George Plimpton



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Journalist/writer/editor/actor George Plimpton co-founded the Paris Review and was particularly well known for his immersive take on sports writing, often involving himself competing in professional sporting events and then recording the event. He pitched an exhibition game for the American League, on a team managed by Mickey Mantle, attended pre-season training and played in a scrimmage for the Detroit Lions of the NFL, trained in a National Hockey League preseason game as a goalie, and sparred for three rounds with Sugar Ray Robinson while working for Sports Illustrated.

The cat pictured above was named Mr. Puss. George’s son Taylor recalled that “my father enjoyed nothing more than holding the beast high in the air and making strange, affectionate sounds in that distinguished voice: “Yeanngghh, Puss… Yeaannngh Puss Puss Puss.”

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Julio Cortázar



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Argentine novelist, essayist, and short story writer Julio Cortázar has been called “a modern master of the short story” and was known as one of the founders of the ‘Latin American Boom’ that brought latin literature to a much broader audience in Europe and America – a movement which also included Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda. Cortázar was known for his use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness, and he was interested in surrealist art, and improvisatory jazz. His most famous novel is Hopscotch.

Cortázar was a cat lover who owned a cat named Theodor W. Adorno who he wrote about extensively in the book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds.



writersandkitties.tumblr.com


“I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.”

- Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

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Samuel Johnson



A statue in tribute to Johnson’s beloved cat, Hodge. Via katherinebarber.blogspot.com


Devout Anglican and English author Samuel Johnson wrote poetry, essays, criticisms, and published A Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, described as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship.” Johnson was also very famous for his critical philosophy, and his belief that the best poetry relied on contemporary language (as opposed to purposefully old-timey/decorative verse). He was also the subject of perhaps the most famous biography of all time, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, which is among the works that have described Johnson’s odd tics and gestures in such a way that has led to a posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.

In Boswell’s biography of Johnson, he describes the great thinker’s relationship with his cat, Hodge. “Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he showed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’”

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