Every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books. You knew it within two or three minutes with him. He was an actual human, far more colloquial and normal than you could imagine, given what he engineered on the page.
David Eggers on David Foster Wallace