Jeff Noon's literary top ten

Jeff Noon took the Pulp Net quiz.

A couple of his answers:

My favourite opening line of a novel:

“Call me Ishmael.” Imagine: beginning such a massive book (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick), about such a massive subject (hunting for a giant white whale), with such a note of doubt. What does Melville mean by saying “Call me Ishmael?” Isn’t that the narrator’s real name? It’s an alias? He’s keeping secrets, from sentence one. Why? So then, a great start.

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Deceased author I’d most like to meet at a bus stop late at night when the last bus is nowhere to be seen:

Samuel Beckett. I’d ask him the time and he’d reply, “Time, time, have you had done with your abominable time! One day we are born; one day we die. Is that not enough for you?!” And I’d say in reply, “Hey, Sam, I was only asking.”

Read the other entries to Jeff Noon's literary top ten.

From Pulp Net:

Jeff Noon was born in Manchester, England. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active in the punk scene. His first novel, Vurt, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Since then he has concentrated on finding new ways of writing, suitable for portraying the modern world in all its complexity. His other books include Automated Alice, Pixel Juice, Needle in the Groove and Falling Out Of Cars. His plays include Woundings, The Modernists and Dead Code.

--Marshal Zeringue