When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

When it comes to knowing what to say, to charm, I always had it.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

I realised a little bit to my astonishment that I can give a lecture for a thousand people, and there will be this tumultuous applause, so, you know, I have the feeling well, it can’t be all that bad.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

What I call my ‚self‘ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.