I'm something of a literary anecdote junkie. Maybe it's because writers can be so stupid and clever at the same time. Here's a great one that I found in an Epstein essay:
"Tolstoy [claimed] 'My diaries are me,'--but in his case they aren't; they were chiefly him in his mood of self-flagellation, filled with accounts of his youthful whoring and carousing. He showed the diaries to his young wife--was there ever a genius more stupid than Tolstoy?--which got their marriage off on just the wrong note."
