In the final chapter he accepts death as an inevitability and expects his works to be forgotten quickly, leaving his grandchildren as his only true legacy.
Betjeman never expected his work to endure.
Price expected his work on the Mechanism to change the history of technology.
No, he says, he didn't make it with a reaction in mind because, at that stage, he didn't expect his work to be displayed.
Sepp Blatter expected his work at Fifa to receive greater praise at last month's presidential elections and says he wants due recognition in the future.
Even with this objection, Banksy works often sell on for much more than expected: his work, Keep It Spotless, was estimated to make $350,000 but ended up making $1,700,000 when it finally went under the hammer.
Dr. Wang said he did not expect his work to change managers' personal strategies, but he added that it might speak to fans in a way that slates of numbers never could.
So when a doctor turns writer, we expect his work to have a special kind of insight, a quiet sensitivity, to provide a diagnosis of not only our physical ills but our moral ones too.
At the end of his life, PG Wodehouse, one of Britain's greatest comic writers and a master stylist, admitted (with few regrets) that he never expected his work to be taken seriously by what he called "the intelligentsia" who, he said, tended to look down on comic writing.
He had every right to expect his work would be taken seriously.
