“Authors only write what their characters tell them. Which mean we are scribes, and the characters are the author.”

“Great characters tell their own stories. The author just writes it down for them.”

“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”

“Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character.”

“I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.”

“As the child outlives the father,so must the character bury the author.”