A Room Of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one's own?

The Last Tycoon
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Though I haven't ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures.

Travesty
by John Hawkes

No, No, Henri.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt

He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine -- he could see out, but you couldn't see in.

The Shining
by Stephen King

Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.

Youth and the Bright Medusa
by Willa Cather

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.

Day of the Locust
by Nathaniel West

Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office.

On The Beach
by Nevil Shute

Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy woke soon after dawn.

Siddhartha
by Herman Hesse

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin's son, grew up with his friend Govinda.

Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon

A screaming comes across the sky.