Critics

A novelist on tee-vee, can't remember who, said to someone, can't remember who:

"I knew literature was more than something to write essays about."

As to career critics, why anyone would knowingly condemn themselves to a lifetime of writing secondary materials I'll never understand. Could it have something to do with their inability to . . . you know. I mean they are people who, like everyone else, have an opportunity to try out for the varsity football team in high school, and plead with the coach to let them play JV instead.

One of the best put-downs of the parasitical trade, which never, ever, under any circumstances, speaks of its underpinnings, occurs at the end of the stream of insults Gogo and Didi hurl at each other standing in their Nowhere Land, going on and on as they try to find the most offensive possible term to degrade the other, until one of them comes to the grand climax, after which the contest ends:

"Critic!"

Beckett had a brass set and did not keep them hidden under a basket.