Anthony Trollope was often guilty of "scarcely giving himself time to think, but spluttering and roaring out an instantly-formed opinion couched in the very strongest of terms." At a meeting of surveyors one day, the irascible author suddenly turned on the preceding speaker: "I disagree with you entirely!" he exclaimed. "What was it you said?"

["Every day for years, Trollope reported in his 'Autobiography,' he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next... Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years."]