Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

As quoted by Anthony Grafton in The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 70, with the following footnote: "L. Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1990), 249-250; [...] G. Pomata, "Versions of Narrative: Overt and Covert Narrators in Nineteenth Century Historiography," History Workshop, 27 (1989), 1-17. Coward attributed a stronger version of the remark to John Barrymore: C. Lesley, Remembered Laughter (New York, 1976), xx. 17."