"That reminds me of a man I knew at one time as a decent and quite ordinary and respectable student of philology at a German University. The man became a degenerate—two years sufficed to make him both a drunkard and a novelist. If he met strangers and was asked who he was, in the end he merely replied that he was a fact. 'I’m a fact!' he said, pursing his lips in sheer arrogance."

--Knut Hamsun, Mysteries