Crazy Stable

"Writers are, far more than the general population, a high-risk category for the renovation virus. We can live and work almost anywhere, have a talent for blocking out inconvenient facts (like the slum next door) and are more than usually prone to delusions, not least those of grandeur. Couple this with a tenuous cash flow and the further delusion that we have an instinctive understanding of things like cabinet hardware, and the situation becomes positively dangerous."

--Adam Goodheart (of Washington College in Chestertown, Md.) reviewing The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah in The New York Times Book Review, 3/19/06