I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. … - Edmund White

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I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won’t be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.