It would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy.

Critiquing a musical tribute composed shortly after Gershwin's death (July 11, 1937) by an unnamed mutual friend recounted in The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965); and quoted in "On San Diego: You Can Bet On It" by Tom Blair, in San Diego Magazine (September 2007), p. 272