“I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one in...” — Edward St Aubyn Quote

“I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.”

“Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.”

“It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.”

“When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.”

“A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.”

“I want to be an author.”