“not all characters turn into critics (if that were to happen we’d all be done for!). No, the ones who become critics are the ones who deny their author’s existence–they’re the book’s atheists. They don’t wish to be invented by some inventor and so take revenge the only way they know how: by trying to prove that it’s not the author who invents the characters, it’s the characters who invent the author. You’ll say that I stole that from Feuerbach: I don’t deny the critic’s erudition, I only deny his existence” (61).
“The point is that characters do not, of course, turn into people, but people often turn into characters, that if they serve as material for people who invent people” (61).