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Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.

Only bad writers think they're good.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a writer.

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.