This book contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Bertolt Brecht, Mel Brooks, Constantine Cavafy, Blaise Cendrars, George Eliot, Ella Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Gibbon, Alfred Goldman, Robert Graves, Alfred Hitchcock, Courtney Hodell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Christophe Honore, Horace, Bohumil Hrabal, Peter Stephan Junk, Franz Kafka, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ladislav Klima, Stephane Mallarme, Thomas Mann, Groucho Marx, Thomas Middleton, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Ophuls, Georges Perec, Petronius, Alfred Polgar, Alexander Pope, Cole Porter, Alexander Pushkin, Francois Rabelais, Saian Supa Crew, Viscount Samuel, William Shakespeare, Tupac Shakur, Stendhal, Laurence Sterne, Alexander Stille, Suetonius, Tacitus, Junichiro Tanizaki, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Valery and Virgil.