from On the Arts, by Naomi Beth Wakan

Having ploughed through a thousand pages of adultery, I have now definitively selected de Maupassant as my role model for future short-story writing efforts, and I have three hundred of his stories to learn from. By the way, Guy de Maupassant penned his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” I won’t follow him in this respect, and I hope mine can read: “I have taken pleasure in everything and coveted nothing.”

—Naomi Beth Wakan, On the Arts