The late, irascibly great Nick Tosches was a son of Newark who skipped college, immersed himself in rock journalism at its raucous Lester Bangs-ian height, then went on to write fiction, music biographies (Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis), and a somewhat indescribable book about Dante, teaching himself Latin and medieval Italian along the way.

Tosches wrote as he damn well pleased, and had some thoughts about it:

We are uncomfortable with works that can not be placed comfortably into a category…

Most best-selling books belong to one genre or another—espionage, crime, horror, suspense, romance, mystery, self-help, ghost-written political memoirs that take the genre of boredom to a ghastlier realm…

Like every other writer worth reading, [George V. Higgins] had no clue as to how he did it…

Structure is artifice, and artifice is for saps…