DCLXVI [six hundred sixty-six] entries of passion, envy, and arrogance I started collecting anecdotes and oddities of the literary family from my student years in England, the homeland of irony, sarcasm, and a venomous humor that is launched straight but with great grace and elegance, especially among peers. Later, my findings were enriched with similar snapshots from politics and other arts. As the years passed, this habit, a good antidote to the bitterness that the domestic literary microcosm can generate (since slander has no homeland), did not abandon me... [from the Introduction] "Nietzsche lost his mind because he thought too much. I think very little so I am not in danger of losing mine," exclaimed Nijinsky in the asylum. "A pair of boots is preferable in every case to Pushkin. Pushkin is a foolish luxury." Dostoevsky in an article in the newspaper Epocka. "Fish soup." Salvador Dali commenting on a painting by Jackson Pollock. "I never read a book before writing a review of it, so as not to be prejudiced in its favor." Sidney Smith to his butler, when the latter asked him if he had read Gibbon's The Decline of the Roman Empire. "A sculpture is something you bump into when you step back to look at a painting." Barnett Newman responding to a related question from a student at the New York School of Fine Arts.