Friends and authors

Many of “history’s greatest metaphorical quotations” collected in Mardy Grothe’s Metaphors Be With You relate to literary topics. So I thought I might occasionally focus on some of these quotations in this blog. Today let’s look at some metaphors about authors.

Choose an author as you choose a friend. — Wentworth Dillon

A scene from The Fault in Our Stars

A friend tends to be someone with similar interests, a similar worldview and even a similar personality. The authors we like best probably have the same things in common with us, or at least their books suggest this to be true. Books can be misleading, however.

Earlier this week Linda and I watched the movie The Fault in Our Stars, in which two teenage lovers, both with terminal cancer, travel all the way to Amsterdam to meet an author whose book they love. The author turns out to be an obnoxious drunk, not what they imagined at all.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. — Gustavo Flaubert

Others have made this same comparison of an author to God and a book to the universe. The writer is the creator, the one who determines who lives and who dies, what happens and what doesn’t, where it begins and at what point it ends. Of course, an author, unlike God, has an editor.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so. — W. Somerset Maugham

This seems like a continuation of Flaubert’s observation. Although authors manipulate their characters and stories, their objective is to disguise this from their readers. The story, ideally, seems real to the readers, each development flowing naturally from what has gone on before, almost as if the author were not there at all. And so it is with the universe with respect to God.