“To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.”

“We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please...We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.”

“Where's he getting the bricks? Packard asks. "That's what I don't understand. He brought his own bricks?”

“Where did you get that?" Jace looked down and saw that the spider demon's poison had eaten a hole in his shirt, leaving a good deal of his left shoulder bare. "The shirt? At Macy's Winter sale.”

“Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.”

“One thing I had learnt, the last person you should ask for a solution is the author. If he knew where he was going, he’d stop dead in his tracks.”