Malcolm Hutty emailed me, urging me to take note of this interview with Neal Stephenson, which I certainly will.

And Michael Jennings has already posted this choice quote from it at Samizdata, which deserves to be anthologised for at least the next several hundred years:

Because she'd never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer – one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.

This guy is also impressed. (UPDATE: As is she.)

This Stephenson interview is the kind of thing, I think, that people start copying, pasting and blog-posting about before they've got even half way through it.

The Stephenson picture above, plus another interview, are to be found here.