As for you, the reader, never forget the following: the writer is like a circus horse which has to be taught that it will be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. If that sugar is withheld, it will not perform. As for essayists and critics, they are like cuckolded husbands: always the last to find out…

From Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Male Edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988 (first published in 1984), p. 15, quoting from Joannes Daubmannus’ Lexicon Cosri, 1691, no page.