"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. "
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books."
— Nancy Etchemendy

"This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period."
— Leon Uris

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."
— Oscar Wilde

"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
— Oscar Wilde (The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde)

"Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels."
— Thomas Keneally (Searching for Schindler)