Fashion in Fiction
'Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.' - Virginia Woolf
Nabokov’s fancy prose style
Vladimir Nabokov had synesthesia, a harmless neurological condition which causes mixing of sense. His writings are famous for descriptions in which sounds, shapes and colors are intermingled in order to form a powerful sensual effect.
Re-Joyce!
Upon reading Joyce’s Ulysses, his contemporary T. S. Eliot observed: “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it… Joyce has single-handedly killed the 19th century.”
Dickens’ London
“Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!”
Nick Hornby, The Believer
Famous Correspondence
"Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?" - Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot