Goethe said, The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing ; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary. These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.

"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13 - No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)