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)

    “The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”
    —Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    “I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
    —Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)