“Let me tell you: my whole life, atleast a great part of it, has been directed toward the solution of a problem, or mastery of a fact. It is a matter of attitudes, of stances — of masks, if you wish, though the term has a pejorativeness that I won’t accept. During my life I’ve assumed four or five such stances, based on certain conclusions, for I tend, I’m afraid, to attribute to abstract ideas a life-or-death significance. Each stance, it seemed to me at the time, represented the answer to my dilemma, the mastery of my fact; but always something would happen to demonstrate its inadequacy, or else the stance would simply lose its persuasiveness, imperceptibly, until suddenly it didn’t work — quantitative change, as Marx has it, suddenly becoming qualitative change — and then I had the job to face again of changing masks: a slow and, for me, painful process, if often an involuntary one.” by John Barth, The Floating Opera