It was a wonder that so strange thing as a number should exist in the first place, rivalled only by the greater wonder that they should perform so ob… - Frederik Pohl

It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get.

‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’ That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.

There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.