The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations

by PeterKemp (Editor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.27

  This dictionary presents over 4000 quotations which reflect upon all aspects of literature, covering the popular as well as the strictly literary. The two sections of the book, The Writer's World and Writers and their Works are arranged by topic. In The Writer's World topics encompass: characters, dialogue, imagination, narrative, style - I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage - Frances Trollope (attrib.); fame, inspiration, censorship, plagiarism, money, the human race, insomnia, publishers, and rivalry - One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions - Salman Rushdie; literary forms, e.g. the novel, science fiction, biography, essays, historical writing, travel writing - Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography - Evelyn Waugh.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.27

  Now available as part of the Oxford Paperback Reference series, this new expanded edition of Peter Kemp's acclaimed collection illuminates the world of the writer, from classical literature to crime fiction and from the quill to the PC. Organized by subject, it includes topics ranging from Tools of the Trade and Writer's Block to Ghost Stories and Critics. Shakespeare, Shaw, and Johnson have their say, but authors also include Alice Munro on Illustration and Pushkin on Earning a Living, A. D. Hope on Fables and Fairytales, Rimbaud on Baudelaire and Harold Pinter on Omission. New themes in this edition include Graffiti and Epitaphs, and there are many more quotations by writers on other writers: Ben Okri on Cervantes, Walter de la Mare on Lewis Carroll, and Philip Roth on William Faulkner. The long uphill struggle in playwriting is getting to the top of page one. - Tom Stoppard I'd love to write a book a year, but I don't think I'd have any fans. - Donna Tartt Lads don't write novels. They're down the pub. - Martin Amis on Ladlit You reach an age when every sentence you write bumps into one you wrote thirty years ago. - John Updike Reading ...is a strenuous and pleasurable contact sport. - Maureen Howard There were no innocent blondes in crime fiction. - Ed McBain Never make your publisher pay the postage is the first rule of literary life. - Julian Barnes