... a novel.

I am not particularly happy over this new habit of saying things that I have very little idea what I mean by saying, to tell the truth.

—David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 58.

... a Facebook post.

What kind of sick world do we live in if we cannot think more thoughtful?

—somebody on Facebook.

... infernal letters.

The Enemy [God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, ch. 14.

... essays.

Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no "shop" to talk. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.

—W. H. Auden, "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand, p. 14.