There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it.

St. Patrick’s Day was sunny and unusually mild, men were in shirtsleeves and from the appearance of things work was ending at noon. The bars were full. Coming into one of them from out of the sunlight, Philip Bowman, his eyes blinded, could barely make out the faces along the bar but found a place to stand near the back where they were all shouting and calling to one ­another.

The essence of espionage is duplicity. A clandestine operation without successful deception is not a clandestine operation. In no other field of human endeavor is the widely denigrated maxim concerning justification of means by ends still held in such high regard.

The original Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was still upon the lavatory wall when first he began to lounge by night at The Figaro. In later years he realized he should have gotten his art restorer friend at the Met to sneak in late one woozy night and to photograph it in situ, to date it, and then to remove it and frame it, as a literary / cultural relic of enormous worth, say, to a rich Texas library collecting Albeenia.

During the Watergate Era, there were several periods when certain members of Congress discovered that they could gain a day’s headlines by righteously denigrating our civilian and military clandestine resources.

Rach’el died six months ago. He was thirty-three. One day, about two years ago, something in his head just snapped and he started tearing around all over the place. He lost his health. Then his job. Then his mind.

The man driving the truck is called Cipriano Algor, he is a potter by profession and is sixty-four years old, although he certainly does not look his age. The man sitting beside him is his son-in-law, Marçal Gacho, and he is not yet thirty. Nevertheless, from his face too, you would think him much younger

A man went to knock at the king’s door and said, Give me a boat. The king’s house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand)

My landlady stands in the doorway, one hand braced on the jamb, breathless from climbing the two flights of stairs to my room. She’s come up to bum a cigarette. It’s the same old story. Her doctor convinces her to kick the habit, scares the shit out of her, sends her home full of virtuous resolve. 

What is the point of minor artists? What justification, what possible excuse? The litter, the mountains of waste product churned out by so-called artists, self-called artists, who aren’t artists at all but defilers of the idea of art. Instead of artists they should call themselves besmirchers.