E. B. White, Notes and Comment:

“If the world were merely seductive [...] that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Félix Fénéon:

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Édouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.

Novels in Three Lines is a collection of more than a thousand anonymously-published blurbs that appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. They were all penned by Félix Fénéon who worked as a clerk in the French War Department. Luc Sante, the translator, describes Félix and his “novels”:

They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage [...] They depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.

My friend Kio and I thought it was a perfect narrative to bring to Twitter. She talked to a friend at NYRB (the publisher) and got permission to reprint the text in serial form over Twitter. NYRB are quite excited about it.

You can follow Novels in Three Lines on Twitter at ‘novelsin3lines‘. I suggest tracking it directly using your phone for best results. We’ve agreed to do two updates per day: once at 9am (EST) in the morning like a newspaper and once at 9pm (EST) at night to give you something to smile/talk about with your friends when you’re about town.

Charlie O’Donnell to Joshua Schachter on what to work on next:

Build something that allows you to do less. Take whatever you put the most time/effort into and build something to eliminate it.

Chris Brogan on why Twitter is winning:

One way to win in software is to make your application fertile for building upon. [...] Give people tools to build an ecosystem around it.

Eric Schmidt at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference:

If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.

From Jay Virdy of Summize:

In fact, the most important advice I received was from Brad Burnham and it’s still ingrained in my head, “Create something simple.  Let the market pull you in.”

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General: “Conan! What is best in life?”
Conan (The Barbarian): “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Supposedly this quote is loosely based on what Genghis Khan himself said once.