Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? —

I Was Recently Asked What It Takes To Become A Writer. Three Things, I Answered: First, One Must Cultivate Incompetence At Almost Every Other Form Of Profitable Work. This Must Be Accompanied, Second, By A Haughty Contempt For All The Forms Of Work That One Has Established One Cannot Do. To These Two Must Be Joined, Third, The Nuttiness To Believe That Other People Can Be Made To Care About Your Opinions And Views And Be Charmed By The Way You State Them. Incompetence, Contempt, Lunacy—once You Have These In Place, You Are Set To Go.

A Cat Is The Only Domestic Animal I Know Who Toilet Trains Itself And Does A Damned Impressive Job Of It.

I Should Prefer To Die Laughing, And, On More Than One Occasion, Thought I Might.

The Problem For Me Is That Reading Is, I Won't Say A Sacred, But Nevertheless A Pretty Serious Act.

We Do Not Choose To Be Born.we Do Not--most Of Us, Choose To Die, Or The Times Or Conditions Of Our Death. But Within All This Realm Of Choicelessness, We Do Choose How We Shall Live--courageously Or In Cowardice, Honorably Or Dishonorably, With Purpose Or Adrift. We Decide What Is Important And What Is Trivial. What Makes Us Significant Is What We Do, Or Refuse To Do. We Decide And We Choose--and So We Give Definition To Our Lives.