'Tagged ~ you're It!'

Ten Books: a thousand smirks!

Well here's ten books I've certainly savoured, leading with choice excerpts from the same to convey something of their authorship.

They're not really my favourite works (of which there are simply hundreds that I haven't happened to read yet: maybe you know the feeling!)

Then there's my largely unexplored Library Dandaical which awaits the fullest appreciation and may even afford a writer's voice of some weary tone before its all too late ; )

Thanks to @FromtheBar for what became an exercise in striving to recall a handful of particularly pleasing (mainly fictional) works and the sobering realisation that I was barely able to do so; although a fair bit of exposure to ghost written material may have been instructive enough in the course of my learning to control language over the years.

(Even if ghost writers might have redeemed rather too many 'kiss and tell' type memoirs by special forces types which have put a guilty bow in one of my bookshelves).

Aside from all that, I'm rather keen to learn the source of so much smooth expression and measured sarcasm on the part of @MiltonMarmalade and @WarriorPrincess66 respectively!

1) 'It had never been an ambition of mine to become a writer and this worked in my favour. If you go into battle and you don't care if you are killed it makes you strong. Good art is possible only after one has given up and let go. I let rip.'

Dandy in the Underworld Sebastian Horsley's "unauthorised autobiography" (see link)

2) 'My natural hatred of Reggie Sheffield, the boy whom I was understudying, evaporated quite soon and we became great friends, although I never ceased to pray in my heart that he would be run over by a bus.'

Present Indicative Noël Coward (Volume 1 of his autobiography)

3) 'The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something or even just doing something; we have to be something.'

A Long Way Down Nick Hornby

4) 'This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.'

Keep the Aspidistra Flying George Orwell

5) 'This afternoon, as I strolled round, I thought the one thing I am really loathing is the prospect of being back in the bloody House of C, being yerr'd at the Box by a lot of spiteful drunks, on subjects that bore and muddle me.'

Alan Clark Diaries: In Power 1983-1992

6) 'With the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a schoolbook, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.'

The Complete Prefaces: Volume ll 1914-1929 Bernard Shaw

7) 'My good boy, that is very heroic, but do you really think that I cross swords with every country nobody who chooses to be offended with me?'

Regency Buck Georgette Heyer

8) 'I am never with people; they are in my presence.'

How to Become a Virgin Quentin Crisp

9) 'Perry: That's quite usual, isn't it? I mean, when people get old they can recall, say, Queen Victoria's Jubilee, and not be able to remember what happened last week.

Cora: Nothing did.'

Noël Coward Collected Plays: Five (Waiting in the Wings)

10) 'People sometimes do heroic things because the situation demands it but there's no such thing as a hero.'

Bravo Two Zero Andy McNab