For about three years I’ve been copying and pasting (and sometimes typing up) quotations from book reviews, blogs, obituaries, on-line journal articles, as well as from the books I’m reading. My computer file is simply titled Book of Quotes. This thing — a 230-page loose and baggy monster if ever there was one — grew out of the work I did to create another 200 fiction exercises for my second book of fiction exercises, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, which I wrote between the time I handed in the manuscript for The 3 A.M. Epiphany and the time I handed in the manuscript for The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. The resources for this second book of exercises were often quotations — sometimes only a sentence long — that triggered ideas for next fiction exercises.

Here are two examples of 4 A.M. Breakthrough exercises in rough form:

Heinrich Heine said, “Holland is always fifty years behind the times, so if I hear the world is about to end, I’ll go to Holland.” Write a comedy about the end of the world.

A Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation memo explained decades ago, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”

So you might say I’ve been collecting these quotations for seven years. Walter Benjamin spoke occasionally in his essays of wanting to do exactly this, make a book of quotations with no context, no explanations between the quotes. He wanted to rip the words out of the context of their essays or books so that they became in a real sense his own words. David Shields did something a lot like this for his wonderful and controversial book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Shields’ book was a manifesto for a new way of thinking about writing nonfiction, and in the sweep of his argument he takes on and takes out many of the notions writers have about truth, memoir, nonfiction, fiction, and reality. In the Appendix of the book, Shields says, “This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.” He tells us that his publisher’s lawyers insisted on the appendix’s list of citations for each of the 617 numbered sections. When I read the book, I did indeed flip to the back of the book to see who had spoken his or her peace, but sometimes I did not do this.

I am not sure what I have in mind for my book of quotations. Its subjects range from the science and philosophy of consciousness to baseball to literary point of view problems to animal behavior. There are many other subjects, and I do dip into the “book of quotes” to use the material (although it is arranged only in the order I’ve collected it, at this point). Just the other day I used it to write questions for my PhD graduate students’ comprehensive exams (on subjects they chose ranging from the detective novel to nesting and animal architecture to Melville to walking).

My favorite fiction exercise in The 3 A.M. Epiphany is The Bridge, Exercise 141. “Choose two good, useful, and thrilling paragraphs from other writers of fiction, letters, or nonfiction,” the exercise tells you. “Then make a prose bridge between the paragraphs, although you don’t need to make the matter between the two paragraphs equal to the two bookend paragraphs.” I like the way these two paragraphs put pressure on the bridge paragraph(s), deforming the beginning of my own prose to correspond just a little bit with the first paragraph and doing the same thing at the end, to match the second alien piece of prose. I used to tell my students, especially in undergraduate classes, that they could pull their own writing out of this exercise and have fascinating, stand-alone fiction (I told them this because I did not want to feel I was encouraging plagiarism). But in my own work, I have rarely deleted the other writers’ language. Sometimes I have revised their writing, but I like having the other voices bouncing off my own voices. This, in the end, is what we all do, trying to match our idiolect (our private version of the master language) with the prevailing, proper English (or Arabic or French) of the agreed-upon public language. We are always, as writers, reacting to other people’s uses of language. Young fiction writers and poets often try on the styles of other writers. Some writers never find their own unique voices. I say that we are never far from imitation and direct quotation and paraphrase in anything we write, so enjoy it, use the process to stimulate your prose and poetry, listen to the traces of someone else’s consciousness left in your own expressions of mind and soul.