author
Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.
Letter to Robie Macauley, May 2, 1952, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 35.
It’s better, I think, for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point.
“A Note from Jeffrey Eugenides to Readers,” author’s Facebook page, November 3, 2011.
The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It’s this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.
“Finding Morals Under Empty Heavens,” Science & Spirit, July/August 2007.