Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

I’m a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I’m a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.

People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

And what more am I? I look for aid to the imagination. [But how mistakenly!] I am not that assemblage of limbs we call the human body; I am not a subtle penetrating air distributed throughout all these members; I am not a wind, a fire, a vapor, a breath or anything at all that I can image. I am supposing all these things to be nothing. Yet I find, while so doing, that I am still assured that I am a something.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

I am not a collection of members which we call the human body: I am not a subtle air distributed through these members, I am not a wind, a fire, a vapour, a breath, nor anything at all which I can imagine or conceive; because I have assumed that all these were nothing. Without changing that supposition I find that I only leave myself certain of the fact that I am somewhat.

أنا الذي كنت عدة أشخاص بلا طائل، أريد أن أكون شخصاً واحداً، أنا نفسي

I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone — I always have such a crowded head.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.