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Stanley Elkin, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer's Chapbook. New York: Viking, 19189, p. 128—
My editor at Random House used to tell me, "Stanley, less is more." I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess because I don't believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough. There's a famous exchange between [F. Scott] Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe in which Fitzgerald criticizes Wolfe for one of his novels. Fitzgerald tells him that [Gustave] Flaubert believed in the mot précis and that there are two kinds of writers—the putter-inners and the taker-outers. Wolfe, who probably was not as good a writer as Fitzgerald but evidently wrote a better letter, said, "Flaubert me no Flauberts. Shakespeare was a putter-inner, Melville was a putter-inner." I can't remember who else was a putter-inner, but I'd rather be a putter-inner than a taker-outer.
