Two passages I love. Ever thought I was a bastard? That I had issues? What, only every day? Ah, fuck you. Here’s my excuse:

“Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.”
– Louis Menard, “Bad Comma“, published in the New Yorker, June 28, 2004.

And a deeper, more literary example that I have read about a thousand times this week and absolutely just nails the Man in the Ivory Tower:

“Nothing that this or that casual informant might tell me was of much use in helping me to settle the question of the goodness or wickeness of Bergotte. An intimate friend would furnish proofs of his hardheartedness; then a stranger would cite some instance (touching, since it had evidently been destined to remain hidden) of his real depth of feeling. He had behaved cruelly to his wife. But, in a village inn where he had gone to spend the night, he had sat up with a poor woman who had tried to drown herself, and when he was obliged to go had left a large sum of money with the landlord, so that he should not turn the poor creature out but see that she got proper attention. Perhaps the more great the writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his own, whenever the occassion rose for him to have to deal with an unfortunate person, at least in a transitory way, he would do so not from his own personal standpoint but that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint from which he would have been horrified by the language of those who continue to think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another’s grief. With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude.”
– Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Kilmartin version.