Publishing Quotes - Page 2

• It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Novel, Clear

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• We are interested in stifling the sale of this book. We believe that this can be best accomplished by refusing to be stampeded into giving it publicity...The less discussion there is concerning it the more sales resistance will be created. We therefore appeal to you to refrain from comment on this book...It is our conviction that a general compliance with this request will sound the warning to other publishing houses against engaging in this type of venture. (Signed) Richard E. Gutstadt, Director.

  Madison Grant

  Book, Believe, Publishing House

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• We're not a manufacturer, or an airline, but we do use energy. Printing and publishing newspapers, producing films and television programs, operating 24-hour newsrooms. It all adds carbon to the atmosphere.

  Rupert Murdoch

  Responsibility, Atmosphere, Energy

  Rupert Murdoch's Speech on Carbon Neutrality, www.theaustralian.com.au. May 10, 2007.

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• Yelling is a form of publishing

  Margaret Atwood

  Business, Yelling, Management

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• It's interesting that the book publishing industry, on the iPad, has much more flexibility than the music industry had.

  Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

  Book, Ipads, Interesting

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• I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

  Kenneth Anger

  People, Risk, May

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• Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

  Leonard Cohen

  Song, New York, Men

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• Yoshihiro Togashi here. I'm back doing a weekly serial, and here I am publishing my first volume already. Thanks to all my readers for their support. I am entirely indebted to you. I took this picture (it is a photo of Togashi wearing a rabbit mask) at a certain party by the way, not a shady membership club. I'll work hard to crank out dozens of volumes. I promise not to complain. I won't run away. I won't lose it. I think. Maybe.

  Yoshihiro Togashi

  Running, Party, Hard Work

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• There's still sexism in the world, so there's still sexism in publishing and in graduate school. But it is different. Now, it's more coded and harder to detect. It was more explicit when I was in school. There were no rules against male professors asking out female students. The reverse didn't happen since female professors were rare or nonexistent. Visiting writers came, 90% of them male, and some expected that a female student would materialize as his date for the visit.

  Debra Monroe

  School, World, Female

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've been here 21 years, and I literally did walk up and down Music Row trying to break into the business. I felt very free to go into any publishing company.

  Steven Curtis Chapman

  Break Up, Years, Trying

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• Publishing a sophisticated men's magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I'd been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot.

  Hugh Hefner

  Dream, Sex, Teenager

  Interview with Larry Dubois, iplayboy.com. January 1, 1974.

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• There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Kings, Writing, Men

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• A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Believe, Fantasy, Wonder

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• Anbody can make an easy deal, but only a true agent can sell a dog.

  Irving Paul Lazar

  Dog, Agents, Easy

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• In the war time many of the publishing houses were privately owned, a single publisher or a publisher and a few associates who were responsible for everything. They could take whatever risks they wanted, could essentially publish what they liked according to their taste. Publishers today are working for big corporations. They have different pressures. I don't think they can make decisions quite as independently as they used to be able to. They have more corporate and financial responsibilities weighing on them. They're not free to go broke or go to jail.

  James Salter

  War, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

  Tillie Olsen

  Doe, Results, Occasional

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• You'd better discover a more important motive than publication for your work or else you'll go crazy. My sense is that you'll be writers only if you are convinced that to write is something for which there is no substitute in your life. You must therefore be ambitious for your work rather than for its promotion. The good news here is that if you assign secondary importance to publishing and primary to writing itself, you will write better, and will thus increase your odds of getting publishing.

  Sydney Lea

  Crazy, Writing, Odds

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• As soon as you start publishing, you are the star and so people see you that way.

  Jeffrey Walker

  Stars, People, Way

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• There are people who have never studied writing who are capable of being writers. I know this because I am an example. I was a part-time registered nurse, a wife, and a mother when I began publishing. I'd taken no classes, had no experience, no knowledge of the publishing world, no agent, no contacts ... Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.

  Elizabeth Berg

  Mother, Taken, Writing

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• When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

  Alan Garner

  Writing, Simple, World

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• At the time, liberals didn't understand that they had First Amendment rights. So, I was doing cartoons in this narrative cartoon form about subject surrounding that and as I was turned down by editor after editor at each publishing house, I began to notice on their desks this new newspaper called The Village Voice, which I then went and picked up and thought, well my god, these editors that were turning me down all, whom tell me how much they like my stuff, but they don't know how to market it because nobody knows who I am. If I got into this paper, they would know who I am.

  Jules Feiffer

  House, Cartoon, First Amendment

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, People, Use

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.64, Macmillan

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• I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

  Hannes Alfven

  Science, Ideas, Conflict

  "Hannes Alfvén: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents". Book by Anthony L. Peratt, p. 197, 1998.

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• Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

  Greg Egan

  Book, Conceited, Firsts

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• Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don't know how to do their jobs. "I don't know how to sell this," they explain, frowning, as though it's your fault. "I don't know how to package this. I don't know what the market is for this book. I don't know how we're going to draw attention to this." In most occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Jobs, Book, Thinking

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