“The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life. "The characters crowd onto the page", writes Mauriac, "there to accomplish all those things which the personal destiny of the author has kept at bay.”

“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.”

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

“Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

“Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.”

“When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.”

“Great things are not accomplished with physical strength and agility," says Cicero, "but through consultation, authority, and the mature wisdom which old age, far from lacking, is endowed with abundantly.”

“The person in the poem is a character like a character in fiction whom the poet has invented--without clothes or a family, or a place of birth, just a voice--to convey himself. Any resemblance he bears to the poet you meet on a signing line is slightly less than coincidental. Meeting the author is one of life's most reliably disappointing experiences, not because authors are such nasty people, but because you have already met them under the best possible circumstance--on the page.”

“A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.”

“Every author has several motivations for writing, and authors of technical books always have, as one motivation, the personal need to understand; that is, they write because they want to learn, or to understand a phenomenon, or to think through a set of ideas.”