Jonathan Raban - Inspiration and Writing Style

Inspiration and Writing Style

  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • Summer Lightning by PG Wodehouse
  • Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows by Philip Larkin
  • Collected Poems by Robert Lowell
Mr. Raban's ... style ... can be described as a sort of English Capote: vivid, funny, accurate, full of hyperbolic wit and outrageous metaphor; no reticence at all. But at least as important is the author's ability to make an instant connection with virtually any human being whomsoever. Noel Perrin, New York Times

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Famous quotes containing the words inspiration and, inspiration, writing and/or style:

    The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.
    William Burroughs (b. 1914)

    The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?
    Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)