Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten.
I get daily e-mails from Afghans who thank me for writing this book [The Kite Runner], as they feel a slice of their story has been told by one of their own. So, for the most part, I have been overwhelmed with the kindness of my fellow Afghans.
Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.
What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.
On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.
I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams.
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.
The best writing advice I had was [in] ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author) Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that had a big impact on me.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.
Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Fortunately age does not affect literature. After a man is dead, he may continue in the business and often rank higher than his living competitors.
Ray Bradbury was not ahead of his time. He was perfectly of his time, and more than that: he created his time and left his mark on the time that followed.
Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is.
The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.
An author departs, he does not die.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text.
He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.
