"...the new world, the communo-bourgeois, sermonizing, Tartuffian, automobilistic, alcoholic, gluttonous and cancerous world has only two anxieties: ass and bank account...""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"In truth, a mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"The result will be something unutterably tedious."
— George Gissing

"Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does."
— Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)