This dictionary presents over 4000 quotations which reflect upon all aspects of literature, covering the popular as well as the strictly literary. The two sections of the book, "The Writer's World" and "Writers and their Works" are arranged by topic. In "The Writer's World" topics encompass: characters, dialogue, imagination, narrative, style - "I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage" - Frances Trollope (attrib.); fame, inspiration, censorship, plagiarism, money, the human race, insomnia, publishers, and rivalry - "One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions" - Salman Rushdie; literary forms, e.g. the novel, science fiction, biography, essays, historical writing, travel writing - "Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography" - Evelyn Waugh.