“The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice.”

“David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes.”

“We wrote our names in the sandYou crossed mine out: I can't getback to the way I was.”

“It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.”

“We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.”

“Not to me," I said.Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote TheCharterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on MadameBovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man WithoutQualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about anyof that now?”