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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón , book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Carlos Ruiz Zafón 149

Spanish writer 1964

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“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.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Along with plot, I am always thinking about structure. Sometimes the story guides you to the best structure for its telling. Using letters seemed like the best way to tell this story. When writing these letters, the characters are selecting what they want to tell. In this case, the woman is writing in a way that would not endanger her or her family if her letters were found by the military authorities who took over the country, and the man is writing with the urgency of someone who could die at any minute while at sea.”

Edwidge Danticat (1969) Novelist, short story writer, memoirist

On using an epistolary form for her short story “Children of the Sea” in “An Interview | Edwidge Danticat” http://www.bkreview.org/fall-2018/an-interview-with-edwidge-danticat/ in The Brooklyn Review (Fall 2018)
Interviews

“He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Apology for Smectymnuus (1642)

“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Sharpe knew himself to be a tough man, but he had always thought of himself as a reasonable one, yet now, in the mirror of William's nervousness, he saw himself as something far worse; a bullying man who would use the small authority of his rank to frighten men. In fact, the very kind of officer Sharpe had most hated when he himself was under their embittered authority.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe, p. 81
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Rifles (1988)

“I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

27 June 2007
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Writing for a Hundred Years Hence
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

“The child tells what he got for Christmas, the mature man tells how he spent the day; the immature hunter tells how many birds he shot, the mature gunner tells of the experience. If I can impart a sense of gunning values through my writing, I urge the gunner at any age to lift himself above the childish state of mind, thinking only of himself and not what he is doing to the birds.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

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

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Carlos Ruiz Zafón 149

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