A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.

The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (2:579)

The art of a great writer is seen in the perfect fitness of his expressions. He knows how to blend vividness with vagueness, knows where images are needed, and where by their vivacity they would be obstacles to the rapid appreciation of his thought.

A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly. This omniscience forces them to become even more creative, more imaginative, and more insightful. Ultimately, they express what they deeply believe, but not until they have allowed themselves to weight each living issue and experience all its possibilities.

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

A good writer has a sense of integrity that is hard to compromise.

A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings — where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation — but in his personality.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.