If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it’s still pretty clear what’s there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk.
“My library is terribly disordered and disorganized; I tear out what I want. I don’t think that a writer has any responsibility to view literature as a continuous process. I believe that very little of literature is immortal. I’ve known books in my lifetime to serve beautifully, and then to lose their usefulness, perhaps briefly.”
John Cheever