John Barth

I discovered by happy accident the turn-of-the-century Brazilian novelist Joaquim Machado de Assis... Machado, himself much under the influence of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy--taught me something I had not quite learned from Joyce's Ulysses and would not likely have learned from Sterne directly, had I happened to have read him: how to combine formal sportiveness with genuine sentiment as well as a fair degree of realism.