I have no doubt that Mann meant this, but the context of the quote is worth noting. It comes from his novella Tristan, which takes place in a sanatorium - like The Magic Mountain. The protagonist is an aspiring writer called Detlev Spinell. He is writing a letter to a woman in the sanatorium that he has a crush on and is having a devil of time, getting up and pacing about, sitting down again, putting his thought one way, then another. Observing him, Mann notes, you would have thought "that a writer is someone ..." Mann was a great ironist.
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