He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...

he didn't really care. he was tired

I'm sick and tired of people disrespecting me and talking about me that isn't true. In the long run, after fifty years, that's enough.

John Byrne is tired of stepping up to the plate. John Byrne is tired of “doing the right thing” and getting f**ked up the ass for his troubles. John Byrne is tired of being lied to. John Byrne is tired of you. (2006)

I am sick of having opinions. I am sick of talking.

Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur?
Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it. ...I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think...

must have been very tired, for I was getting as full of silly prejudices as a minor poet.

Since the publication of his first book he had avoided as far as possible all knowledge of what the critics had to say about him; his nervous temperament could not bear the agitation of reading these remarks, which, however inept, define an author and his work to so many people incapable of judging for themselves.

El hombre tenía tal entendimiento que ya casi no servía para nada.

He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

“The intrigue is not even what makes this work intriguing,” he quipped.

Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

No one cared enough to criticise, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits. He found that he could not be this — or that — or the other; always precisely the things he wanted to be. He had not wit or scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges were right. His work seemed to him thin, commonplace, feeble. At times he felt his own weakness so fatally that he could not go on; when he had nothing to say, he could not say it, and he found that he had very little to say at best.

Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.