You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.

Flaubert put it.

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People who more immediately think of Mersault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.

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Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’ headstone.

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An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks almost as much as you do.

Said Dylan Thomas.

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Van Gogh, in a letter from Arles, some few weeks after having presented a piece of his ear to a woman in a brothel:  I went yesterday to see the girl I had gone to when I went astray in my wits. They told me that in this country things like that are not out of the ordinary.

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The very possibly not apocryphal tale that David Hume, always grossly overweight, once went down on one knee to propose marriage–and could not get back up.

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He is not writing about something; he is writing something. Said Samuel Beckett, re Joyce.

(Though Beckett also said, “How ugly the semicolon is,” and perhaps to help him get through the semicolon crisis, “The best way to forget something is to keep thinking about it.”)