933 Quotes About Authors

A reader reads a book. If it’s a good book, he forgets himself. That’s all a book has to do. When the reader can’t forget himself and keeps having to think about the writer the whole time, the book is a failure. That has nothing to do with fun. If it’s fun you’re after, buy a ticket for a roller coaster.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.

Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist.

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.