“[Infinite Jest] was about five hundred pages longer.  Of which four hundred unambiguously needed to go, and the other hundred was painful.

“That’s like losing a whole novel.

“It’s not really a novel; it’s not supposed to be a novel.

“The definition of a novel is … I never thought of this as a novel, I thought of it as a long story.”

– from Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, by David Lipsky (p.79)