"This book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory of physiological processes whose presence or absence... makes no difference... whatever are you doing?"

Aphra Benn: Hello
Cervantes: Donkey
Daniel Defoe: To christen the day!
Samuel Richardson: Hello
Henry Fielding: Tittle-tattle Tittle-tattle...
Lawrence Sterne: Hello
Mary Wolstencraft: Vindicated!
Jane Austen: Here I am!
Sir Walter Scott: We're all doomed!
Leo Tolstoy: Yes!
Honoré de Balzac: Oui...
Edgar Allen Poe: Aaaarrrggghhhh!
Charlotte Brontë: Hello...
Emily Brontë: Hello...
Anne Brontë: Hellooo..?
Nikolai Gogol: Vas chi
Gustav Flaubert: Oui
William Makepeace Thackeray: Call me 'William Makepeace Thackeray'
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The letter 'A'
Herman Melville: Ahoy there!
Charles Dickens: London is so beautiful this time of year...
Anthony Trollope: good-good-good-good evening!
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Here come the sleepers...
Mark Twain: I can't even spell 'Mississippi'!
George Eliot: George reads German
Emile Zola: J'accuse
Henry James: Howdy Miss Wharton!
Thomas Hardy: Ooo-arrr!
Joseph Conrad: I'm a bloody boring writer...
Katherine Mansfield: [cough cough]
Edith Wharton: Well hello, Mr James!
DH Lawrence: Never heard of it
EM Forster: Never heard of it!

Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'

James Joyce: Hello there!
Virginia Woolf: I'm losing my mind!
Marcel Proust: Je me'en souviens plus
F Scott Fitzgerald: baa bababa baa
Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the....
Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so hasslich
Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!
William Faulkner: Tu connait William Faulkner?
Anaïs Nin: The strand of pearls
Ford Maddox Ford: Any colour, as long as it's black!
Jean-Paul Sartre: Let's go to the dome, Simone!
Simone de Beauvoir: see'est exact present
Albert Camus: The beach... the beach
Franz Kafka: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!
Thomas Mann: Mam
Graham Greene: Call me 'pinky', lovely
Jack Kerouac: Me car's broken down...
William S Burroughs: Wowwww!

Happy the man, and happy he alone who in all honesty can call today his own;
He who has life and strength enough to say 'Yesterday's dead & gone - I want to live today'

Kingsley Amis: (cough)
Doris Lessing: I hate men!
Vladimir Nabokov: Hello, little girl...
William Golding: Achtung Busby!
JG Ballard: Instrument binnacle
Richard Brautigan: How are you doing?
Milan Kundera: I don't do interviews
Ivy Compton Burnett: Hello...
Paul Theroux: Have a nice day!
Günter Grass: I've found snails!
Gore Vidal: Oh, it makes me mad!
John Updike: Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run...
Kazuro Ishiguro: Ah so, old chap!
Malcolm Bradbury: stroke John Steinbeck, stroke JD Salinger
Iain Banks: Too orangey for crows!
AS Byatt: Nine tenths of the law, you know...
Martin Amis: [burp]
Brett Easton Ellis: Aaaaarrrggghhh!
Umberto Eco: I don't understand this either...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Mi casa es su casa
Roddy Doyle: ha ha ha!
Salman Rushdie: Names will live forever...


Lyrics submitted by ilse

The Booklovers Lyrics as written by Neil Hannon

Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Lyrics powered by LyricFind

The Booklovers song meanings
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3 Comments

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  • 0
    General Comment

    I can picture Neil in his Dad's library, looking at names of authors and writing them down. "Aphra Benn, Cervantes..."

    monkfluenceon May 30, 2006   Link
  • 0
    General Comment

    The song is about two lovers discussing their favourites books and authors, during a day out at the seaside.

    Possibly the greatest work of The Divine Comedy.

    thecosmosboyon April 12, 2009   Link
  • 0
    Song Fact

    "Happy the man" verse is inspired by John Dryden's English translation of one of Horace's odes (Imitation of Horace, book III, ode 29, vv. 65-72).

    The Dryden's original text is also quoted in "Ode to the Man", the last mini-track of the album:

    Happy the man, and happy he alone He, who can call today his own He who, secure within, can say Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today

    nickolayon October 11, 2015   Link

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