For the uninitiated, Russell Hoban's novels are well worth a look. Hobanites do this little thingy for the man on his birthday (February 4th), he will be 81 this year. Check out the site (below).
Here's mine for this year (same as last, busy busy):

"'Do you think the rain remembers. Fremder?'

'I think everything remembers, Pythia.'

'…especially the rain. It remembers when the world was new, remembers how the seas filled up. Think of all the midnights and the dawns the rain remembers, how many there were before a single word was spoken. Neither pleasant palaces nor wild dogs to howl in them, only the steam rising as the seas filled up, only the white mist on the water in the ancient mornings.'"

From 'Fremder', a novel by Russell Hoban

www.thoughtcat.com/sa4qe

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

That excerpt is excellent. To think that I'd never heard of Hoban until now! I'm just a rube, I guess.

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

Kurt Vonnegut by a landslide.