“May I say that I am perhaps the best lawyer on the Eastern Shore? Perhaps I shouldn’t, for you’ll take the statement as self-praise. If I thought the practice of law absolutely important, then my statement would indeed be as much a boast as a description; but truthfully I consider advocacy, jurisprudence, even justice, to have no more intrinsic importance than, say, oyster-shucking. And you’d understand, wouldn’t you, that if a man like myself asserted with a smile that he was the peninsula’s best oyster shucker (I’m not), or cigarette roller, or pinball-machine tilter, he’d not be guilty of prideful boasting? It requires small subtlety to grasp that, I think.”
John Barth, The Floating Opera (1956).
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