Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.
My dad is a writer, and to see him always in front of a typewriter gave me the inspiration to write. He was my idol, my hero. I wanted to be just like him.
Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.
Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that.
Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.
I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.
Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.
A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.
Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.
The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.
I don't know how much longer I'll be around. I'll probably be writing when the Lord says, 'Maya, Maya Angelou, it's time.'
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
There are bits and pieces of me probably in every one of my 35 or so books.
It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.
It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.
There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.
What is new about Barthes's posthumous reputation is the view of him as a writer whose books of criticism and personal musings must be admired as serious and beautiful works of the imagination.
