The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of h… - Clive James

In Australia during WWII, a couple of established poets invented the supposedly nonsensical works of a fictitious poet called Ern Malley and used them to discredit the modernist pretensions of the young editor who printed them. It never occurred to them that as writers of talent they were not in a position to suppose that they could deliberately write something perfectly meaningless.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.