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I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.

Alan Moore's writing is almost novelistic. It's very intricate and wordy and smart.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

The intelligent man is one who has successfully fulfilled many accomplishments, and is yet willing to learn more.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.