Affair Quote by Mary McCarthy

“Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a…

— Jonathan Franzen

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

— David Foster Wallace

Fiction is love and hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musings on have-beens and might-have-beens.

— Anonymous

Novel writing is solitary work.

— Mohsin Hamid

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

— Hilma Wolitzer

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers…

— Paul Auster

This Is Not a Novel memorializes the treasures and detritus of one man's singularly cultured mind. (...) If you don't know Writer's work at…

— Michael Dirda

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination.

— Ellen Glasgow

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

— Flannery O'Connor

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

— Megan Abbott

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have…

— Iris Murdoch

Writing a novel is solitary, but I don't mind that.

— Ruth Jones