Then, seek a poet who your way does bend,
And choose an author as you choose a friend;
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate and fond;
Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,
No longer his interpreter, but he.

That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality’s almost impossible to describe or account for straight out — it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility — and critics’ attempts to reduce it to questions of “style” are almost universally lame.

When we say we like a writer's style, what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper. Given a choice between two traveling companions — and a writer is someone who asks us to travel with him — we usually choose the one who we think will make an effort to brighten the trip.

Authors are partial to their wit

The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves — it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence — it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste — and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence ; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author ; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own !

My favorite authors are Indian and Arabic/Mid Eastern. Because of their descriptive style and the way they have a way with making words so colorful and turn the words into their very own language. I guess I am also biased towards their writing because I grew up and schooled in the coastal port city of Mombasa whose inhabitants are predominantly Indian/Swahili/Muslim-Arabic. There is some influencing force about a coastal culture. On top of my Christianity, I would fast on Ramadhan, celebrate Diwali, have Muslim and Indian friends for sleepovers at our place and cook a wicked chicken biryani and mutton pilau!

"she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway — a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe — all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.

Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?

We all have personal favorites,
whether we choose a god or a friend.

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.

My hands-down favorite writer is my friend , and that's in large part because much of what I've learned about writing over the last couple of decades has come in the form of gifts from him. Carlo is an apostle of craft, skill, mastery, and work. He writes great prose, to be sure, but he has also taught me about blocking, outlining, editing, structure—all those things I pretended to do, but never actually did. Talking to Carlo, I am always reminded that craft itself produces ideas and insights, unbidden thoughts that transcend the nuts and bolts work. That's why we tell our students that writing is thinking, and that thinking may well be incomplete without writing.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.