... an introduction to a novel.

Far from being an elitist, or seeing himself as writing for a select coterie, Johnson professed himself baffled by public and critical taste. Why shouldn’t his dazzling innovations, his ingenious re-thinkings of the novel’s possibilities, be winning him both critical respect and a wide readership? ‘The mainstream’, in other words, was exactly where he wanted to be: but a mainstream defined according to his own terms.

—Jonathan Coe, introduction to B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates.

... literature.

In my mouth, time moves slowly for candy.

—Edouard Levé, Autoportrait, translated by Lorin Stein.

... not all of some diaries.

A man has to be a hundred times as great as the things he produces. There is so much leakage of power between conception and accomplishment.

—Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, February 1, 1940.