"My top forty? I suspect the list would be longer than that and would seem odd, mostly because I couldn't stop to explain why I like each writer. Even then, much of it probably resembles the lists of everyone else (or of English class syllabuses); for instance, my favourite book is Ulysses and my list would no doubt include Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Dickens and George Eliot, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. So let me just mention at random a few people on my list who might not turn up everywhere. Ring Lardner, G.K. Chesterton, O. Henry, Nathaniel West, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, Harry Mathews, Bernard Malamud, Vance Bourjailly, George P. Elliott, Djuna Barnes, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Kenneth Koch, Robert Coover, Vladimir Nabokov, Angus Wilson, Terry Southern, Evelyn Waugh, Flann O'Brien -- to mention only writers in English. The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate."

- John Sladek, from an interview from 1982.