Everyday A Word Surprises Me

Advice, strong opinions, and personal revelations by the world's greatest writers - exclusively researched for this new book. Featuring the most inspirational and insightful collection of quotes by writers through the ages and across the globe, Every Day a Word Surprises Me is the ideal keepsake for readers, writers, and everyone who appreciates the exquisite power of words.

This carefully curated book, packed with original research, is a go-to resource for thoughts on a variety of subjects, including originality, punctuation, reading, daily routines, rejection, money troubles, the creative process, love, truth, and more. 'Every day a word surprises me' is a quotation from British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. This collection is full of its own surprises and hard-earned advice - communicated with the eloquence and clarity that only the world's finest writers could summon.

"The ideal keepsake for readers, writers and everyone who appreciates the exquisite power of words... Inspirational."-Artsbeat

"As an antidote to creative block, Phaidon has sought to collect 700 quotes in order to guide readers through the most existential questions about life and love, self-doubt, booze, and the everlasting haunt of rejection... Other than outworn 'inspirational quotes' on websites like Goodreads or Brainyquote, the pocket-size guide mainly contains exclusive words extracted from little-known letters, memoirs and personal notebooks." -DazedDigital.com

- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 336
- Dimension: 21 cm x 14 cm x 3 cm

Industry Reviews
"The perfect recipe to get the creative juices flowing... Contains hundreds of insightful quotes by famous writers and personalities, from Jane Austen to Julian Barnes, Leo Tolstoy to Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf to Henry David Thoreau... [From] motivational to purely relatable."-CentMagazine.co.uk

"Not just another book of trite quotes... Unlike much of this genre, it offers both useful advice and insight... Every Day A Word Surprises Me takes a very simple, not to say hackneyed format, and makes something really quite entertaining and useful out of it... Thanks to some imaginative categorisation and sourcing that takes in published interviews, private journals and letters, any writer will find something of use here... Thanks to the provision of proper sources for all the quotes, including links to web pages for many, they become starting points for further investigation... The book becomes a gateway to as rich an investigation of the art of writing as the reader wishes to make it. This is a book that will benefit from being read with a smartphone in one hand, ready for background googling and link following."-CreativeReview.co.uk

"A prolonged witty publication, containing quotes of the ego and arrogance. But to my surprise I found a collection of over 700 insightful quotes by writers through the ages and from across the globe... By page three I already had seven friends that I wanted to pass this book onto once I had finished it... A delightful book with its mix of font's throughout, irregular type size and hardback cover it's a graphic nerds' dream... Every Day a Word Surprises Me is one of those rare books containing no images that you will want to come back to time and time again."-55factory.net

"The varied typography on every page makes it all the more readable and fun to dip into."-Mature Times

"This collection is full of its own surprises and hard earned advice, communicated with the eloquence and clarity that only the world's finest writers could summon... inspirational and insightful."-Project Calm

"This is the perfect coffee table or bedside table book: to take and give, or to borrow, to re-read often and without a precise scheme."-Slow-Words.com

"An inspiring collection of selected wisdom from a host of well-known and iconic writers... On a wide variety of subjects, feelings and experience."-The Essential Journal

"In this compilation, striking imagery, insightful humour and paradoxical wisdom abound... The thematic structure makes for many rewarding contrasts of both attitude and tone.. There is plenty of witty brevity here... Variety of presentation is everything. Through a range of font forms, cases, sizes and layouts, the design reflects and enhances the one or message of the words in question... While there are countless websites offering "inspirational writer quotes" for free, these kinds of details more than justify the duration of collection quotes in book form."-TLS (Times Literary Supplement)