"This book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory of physiological processes whose presence or absence... makes no difference... whatever are you doing?"


Aphra Benn: Hello

Cervantes: Donkey

Daniel Defoe: To christen the day!

Samuel Richardson: Hello

Henry Fielding: Tittle-tattle Tittle-tattle...

Lawrence Sterne: Hello

Mary Wolstencraft: Vindicated!

Jane Austen: Here I am!

Sir Walter Scott: We're all doomed!

Leo Tolstoy: Yes!

Honoré de Balzac: Oui...

Edgar Allen Poe: Aaaarrrggghhhh!

Charlotte Brontë: Hello...

Emily Brontë: Hello...

Anne Brontë: Hellooo..?

Nikolai Gogol: Vas chi

Gustav Flaubert: Oui

William Makepeace Thackeray: Call me 'William Makepeace Thackeray'

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The letter 'A'

Herman Melville: Ahoy there!

Charles Dickens: London is so beautiful this time of year...

Anthony Trollope: good-good-good-good evening!

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Here come the sleepers...

Mark Twain: I can't even spell 'Mississippi'!

George Eliot: George reads German

Emile Zola: J'accuse

Henry James: Howdy Miss Wharton!

Thomas Hardy: Ooo-arrr!

Joseph Conrad: I'm a bloody boring writer...

Katherine Mansfield: [cough cough]

Edith Wharton: Well hello, Mr James!

DH Lawrence: Never heard of it

EM Forster: Never heard of it!


Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;

He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'


James Joyce: Hello there!

Virginia Woolf: I'm losing my mind!

Marcel Proust: Je me'en souviens plus

F Scott Fitzgerald: baa bababa baa

Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the....

Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so häßlich

Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!

William Faulkner: Tu connait William Faulkner?

Anaïs Nin: The strand of pearls

Ford Maddox Ford: Any colour, as long as it's black!

Jean-Paul Sartre: Let's go to the dome, Simone!

Simone de Beauvoir: C'est exact present

Albert Camus: The beach... the beach

Franz Kafka: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!

Thomas Mann: Mam

Graham Greene: Call me 'pinky', lovely

Jack Kerouac: Me car's broken down...

William S Burroughs: Wowwww!


Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;

He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'


Kingsley Amis: [cough]

Doris Lessing: I hate men!

Vladimir Nabokov: Hello, little girl...

William Golding: Achtung Busby!

JG Ballard: Instrument binnacle

Richard Brautigan: How are you doing?

Milan Kundera: I don't do interviews

Ivy Compton Burnett: Hello...

Paul Theroux: Have a nice day!

Günter Grass: I've found snails!

Gore Vidal: Oh, it makes me mad!

John Updike: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run...

Kazuro Ishiguro: Ah so, old chap!

Malcolm Bradbury: stroke John Steinbeck, stroke JD Salinger

Iain Banks: Too orangey for crows!

AS Byatt: Nine tenths of the law, you know...

Martin Amis: [burp]

Brett Easton Ellis: Aaaaarrrggghhh!

Umberto Eco: I don't understand this either...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Mi casa es su casa

Roddy Doyle: ha ha ha!

Salman Rushdie: Names will live forever...