The Shorter List Would Have Been Who He Didn’t Quote

Impressive.

Then The Observer just started writing down names every time Mr. Dyer quoted someone, which happened roughly every three minutes, beginning with the people he quoted in the essay he read about going to the couture shows in Paris from his new collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and then moving on to the writers he quoted from memory in the Q and A.

Here is the list, which took up most of the receipt and therefore is not in any particular order, and probably not even exhaustive:

1. Mark Doty (who provided the following epigraph to Mr. Dyer’s essay on the couture shows: “The world’s made fabulous / by fabulous clothes.”)

2. Frank Gehry

3. Philip Larkin

4. Don Delillo (Mr. Dyer quoted the following: “her face conveyed the suggestion of lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit.”)

5. Jim Morrison

6. Nietzsche

7. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night

9. Nicholson Baker

10. Tony Judt (who came up when Mr. Dyer commented on “the incredible regression in social mobility” in Britain.)

11. T.C. Boyle’s Budding Prospects

12. Albert Camus’ Lyrical and Critical Essays

13. Jonathan Franzen (Mr. Dyer recalled something a friend said about Mr. Franzen: “he suffers so you don’t have to.”)

14. Sebastian Faulks

15. Thomas Mann

16. “Borgesian”

17. Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

18. Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “I like her tone.”

19. Julian Barnes

20. Martin Amis

21. Alan Hollinghurst (Mr. Dyer called him “the greatest straight-down-the-line English novelist,” remembering with particular fondness the description, “knob-flaunting speedo.”)

22. Renata Adler’s Speedboat

23. John Updike

24. Thomas Bernhardt

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