The Number Of Single Word Titles Available To An Author Wishing To Write A Classic Is Steadily Diminishing

The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be someday is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.

(Vladmir Nabokov, Foreword to Despair, Panther, London, 1969 [1965], p. 8).