Publishers Quotes - Page 21

• But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,-- Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.

  Lord Byron

  Sports, Journey, Demand

  Lord Byron (2013). “Don Juan”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

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• At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

  James Thurber

  Flower, Writing, Leaving

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.149, Library of America

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• The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

  Paul Johnson

  Evil, Crooks, Toss

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• Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.

  Dan Brown

  Character, People, Style

  "Dan Brown: Veni vidi da Vinci". www.theguardian.com. December 12, 2004.

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• I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits.... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.

  John Adams

  Religious, Kings, Men

  "The Manner Is Ordinary" by Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., Ph.D., www.huffingtonpost.com. September 22, 2015.

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• The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher? Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers.

  Bill Watterson

  Movie, Character, Rights

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• Books are savaged and careers destroyed by surly snots who write anonymous reviews and publishers can't be bothered to protest this institutionalized corruption.

  Warren Murphy

  Book, Writing, Careers

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• We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.

  Kathryn Minshew

  Advertising, Muse, Length

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• All my writing-life people kept telling me that I should stop writing short stories and start writing novels: my agent, my Israeli publisher, my foreign ones, my bank manager - they all felt and keep feeling that I'm doing something wrong here.

  Etgar Keret

  Writing, People, Feelings

  "Suddenly: An Interview With Etgar Keret". Interview with Courtney Becks, www.raintaxi.com. Summer 2012.

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• I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

  Rick Moody

  Book, President, Wonder

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've never signed a contract, so never have a deadline. A deadline's an unnerving thing. I just finish a book, and if the publisher doesn't like it, that's his privilege.

  Marchette Chute

  Book, Privilege, Contracts

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• We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers.

  Charlotte Cotton

  Civilization, Editors, Photographer

  "Charlotte Cotton: Surveillance Revisited". Interview with Nicole Miller, www.guernicamag.com. June 15, 2016.

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• I don't use the term 'miracle' lightly. I don't believe in God, or reincarnation, or destiny, or the Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

  Rick Reynolds

  Believe, Destiny, Miracle

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• Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.

  John Creasey

  Writing, Editors, Ideas

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• Your turn Imagine that the world had no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR folks, no one telling you what you couldn’t do. If you lived in that world, what would you do? Go. Do that.

  Seth

  Boss, World, Imagine

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• Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

  Richard Curtis

  Book, Writing, Faster

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• As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

  Judith Thurman

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  "Ask the Author Live: Judith Thurman on Laura Ingalls Wilder". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2009.

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• I believe that online paid content hasn't worked for general circulation newspapers because consumers weren't ready for it, because the implementation did not deliver enough value, because content was typically the same as in the print version, and because much of the material was being syndicted by the papers to other publishers or was not protected with DRM technologies to exclude use by others.

  Robert G. Picard

  Believe, Technology, Drm

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• I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

  Joanne Harris

  Book, Fiction, Next

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• Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Literature, Honest, Trustworthy

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1722, Delphi Classics

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• Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

  Samuel Beckett

  Book, Obscurity, Obscure

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• As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.

  Calvin Trillin

  Book, Average, Milk

  Calvin Trillin (1987). “Uncivil liberties”, Penguin Group USA

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• When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

  Brian Patten

  Sight, Clothes, Poetry

  Brian Patten (2007). “Selected Poems”, ePenguin

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• Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Hero, Four

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.221, Vintage

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• I failed, many times in my life. One failure that I always remember was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. Many years later, I watched HuffPost come alive

  Arianna Huffington

  Book, Years, Alive

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