"“But you really are, you know.” This was said with intense earnestness. “I mean good, really good. I think it is wonderful to be an author like you. It must be almost like being God.”Graham stared blankly. “Not to editors, sister.”Sister didn’t get the whisper. She continued, “To be able to create living characters out of nothing; to unfold souls to all the world; to put thoughts into words; to build pictures and create worlds. I have often thought that an author was the most gloriously gifted person in all creation. Better an inspired author starving in a garret than a king upon his throne. Don’t you think so?”“Definitely,” lied Graham."

“I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it.”

“Les sots font le texte, et les hommes d'esprit les commentaires.”

“An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (9 December 1852)”

“All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.Which was a writer.By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.”

“And hold up to the sun my little taper.”

“But every fool describes, in these bright days,His wondrous journey to some foreign court,And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,—Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.”