quotIt may seem paradoxical to speak of such insights as liberating or to find in the Underground Mans impassioned rejection of rational humanitarianism a call to arms Yet each age we live through as individuals demands a certain kind of book just as each era thieves the last with a magpies lust for the gewgaws of thought Oddly enough now I come to look at Notes again and examine it in the round I discover that my revised impression of it as a text at once jejune and cynical callow as well as wise is not perhaps too far from realityquot Will Self quotquotDostoevsky is the man more than any other who has created modern prose and intensified it to its presentday pitchquot James Joyce