Publishers Quotes - Page 10

• The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.

  John Scott

  Fate, Reviews, Bookshops

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• When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna life insurance.

  Gabe Newell

  Texas, Years, Guy

  "Valve’s Gabe Newell discusses the frontiers of gaming, from wearable technology to 'tongue controllers'". Interview with Ed Fries, venturebeat.com. July 25, 2012.

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• Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.

  Emma Goldman

  Art, People, Creative

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.39, 谷月社

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• Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.

  Rose Macaulay

  Wells, Jolly, Courses

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• I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

  Anais Nin

  Book, Writing, Ignored

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• Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.

  Willa Cather

  Ruined

  Willa Cather, Marilee Lindemann (2008). “O Pioneers!”, p.172, Oxford University Press

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• For educated Americans like Joseph Ellis, Vietnam is a special hang-up. I am an Englishman of exactly the Vietnam generation, a couple of years younger than Ellis; indeed, for reasons too complicated to explain here, I was nearly drafted into the US army in 1965. I know many Americans of my own age and, as much to the point, my own class - journalists, publishers, lawyers. And I don't think I know one who served in Vietnam.

  Geoffrey Wheatcroft

  Couple, Army, Thinking

  "Not so macho" by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2001.

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• When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.

  Wendy Kaminer

  Children, Angel, Heaven

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• I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

  Charles Baxter

  Stories, Produce, Novel

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Publishers never tell writers anything. They're all crazy and they drive me crazy.

  Anne Bernays

  Crazy, Drive Me Crazy

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• During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on.

  Jacques Derrida

  Writing, Order, Years

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• I actually produced other people's vocals for a long time when I first signed my publishing deal and I had just sort of decided that I only wanted to be a writer. I would be in all of these writing sessions, and a lot of times my publisher would say, "You should get a demo singer to sing it because then it doesn't identify as a Solange song."

  Solange Knowles

  Song, Writing, Long

  "Solange Knowles On Nas, Juvenile And Dance Moves". Interview with Frannie Kelley, www.wbur.org. February 12, 2014.

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• I like the idea of standalone novels. I always found with series of books, it's something that publishers love obviously because they can make a lot of money and they build an audience from book to book, but I don't like that as a writer. I prefer the idea of just telling a story, completing it within your book, and moving on and not forcing a child to read eight of them.

  John Boyne

  Children, Moving, Book

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

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• The cliché I tried to avoid was I hated "teenage sidekicks." I always figured if I were a superhero, there's no way on God's earth that I'm gonna pal around with some teenager. So my publisher insisted I have a teenager in the series, because they always felt teenagers won't read the books unless there's a teenager in the story; which is nonsense.

  Stan Lee

  Teenage, Book, Superhero

  Source: movieweb.com

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• I had been writing comic books for years and I was doing them to please a publisher, who felt that comics are only read by very young children or stupid adults. And therefore, we have to keep the stories very simplistic... And those were all things I hated.

  Stan Lee

  Children, Stupid, Book

  "EXCLUSIVE: Stan Lee Calls Up MovieWeb to Talk Fantastic Four". Interview with Evan Jacobs, movieweb.com. November 11, 2005.

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• You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew he would suggest changes. If you wanted to write and speak what you thought had to be written and spoken, you had to act against all these suppressive rules.

  Stefan Heym

  Writing, Censorship, Speak

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• Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. If you were going to give Rock 'n' Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - Rock and Roll or Christianity.

  John Lennon

  Jesus, Thinking, Rock And Roll

  'Evening Standard' 4 March 1966 (interview with Maureen Cleave).

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• We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Brother, Book, Adventure

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2014). “Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)”, p.54, Jazzybee Verlag

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• As a writer, its important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.

  Amish Tripathi

  Karma, Giving, Important

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• Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.

  Linda Sue Park

  Girl, Book, Taken

  Scholastic Interview, www.scholastic.com.

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• My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

  Mario Benedetti

  Book, Two, Firsts

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• I don't believe in publishers who wish to butter their bannocks on both sides while they'll hardly allow an author to smell treacle. I consider they are too grabby altogether and like Methodists they love to keep the Sabbath and everything else they can lay hands upon.

  Amanda McKittrick Ros

  Believe, Smell, Hands

  Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frank Ormsby (1988). “Thine in storm and calm: an Amanda McKittrick Ros reader”, Blackstaff Pr

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• To aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily. If you think about it, even ten years ago or twenty years ago, there was a middle man, there was a publisher, there were studios, there was this world of rejection letters. Now, we're in a place where we have the technology and the ability to go shoot our own movies or to put stuff on YouTube or a blog, if you're a writer, or self-publish.

  Diablo Cody

  Men, Thinking, Technology

  "Diablo Cody Talks YOUNG ADULT, the EVIL DEAD Remake, SWEET VALLEY HIGH, Her Directorial Debut, and a Lot More". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. December 16, 2011.

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• That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control

  William Monahan

  Past, Editors, Digital Revolution

  Source: collider.com

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• If the big publishers are doing so well, why do they require writers to send return postage with their manuscripts?

  Dan Poynter

  Return, Bigs, Wells

  Dan Poynter (2003). “The self-publishing manual: how to write, print, and sell your own book”, Para Publishing

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