What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) was an Anglo-American essayist and aphorist associated with the late Victorian and early modernist taste for epigram, nuance, and psychological observation. Much of his reputation rests on compact, polished sayings about reading, style, and the indirect effects of literature—ideas he cultivated in notebooks and later published in collections of aphorisms. This remark reflects that milieu: a period when “suggestion” and subtext were increasingly prized over overt moralizing or rhetorical display. Smith’s own prose often aims at the half-heard implication rather than the declared thesis, and the line encapsulates his preference for the intimate, insinuating power of good writing.

Smith contrasts an author’s explicit statements (“what he says”) with the subtler resonance of tone, implication, and unspoken meaning (“what he whispers”). The “whisper” suggests what is conveyed indirectly: the atmosphere behind the sentences, the author’s sensibility, the hints that invite the reader’s imagination to complete the thought. The aphorism also implies a theory of literary value: great writing is not reducible to paraphrasable content, because its deepest effects are felt rather than summarized. In praising the whispered element, Smith elevates suggestion, ambiguity, and emotional undertow—qualities that make a text linger and reward rereading.