You don’t want to get any on your hands

“Writers are a pretty low class. True, it’s not a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one ‘gets to know the inside story,’ one ‘sees people in their true colours.’ On the whole, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)