很多人在写小说。实际上，如果一个人在街上进行调查，爱丁堡的一半正在写小说，这意味着真的没有足够的角色来解决。当然，除非有人写过自己写小说的人。这些虚构人物写作的小说将是什么？好吧，他们将是人们写小说的小说。
(Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.)