Quotes About Literature

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

With the big publishers, they publish 50 books and promote five.

When there are fewer and fewer publishers of scale, it's just not good for authors.

Nobody sells books like J.K. Rowling. We have a rule in publishing: Never compare anything to 'Harry Potter' because it's like lightning in a bottle.

One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.

In 1976, I read a book by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and knew immediately that I, too, could write a historical romance. It took me a year to complete the manuscript. I was a forty-year-old Scarborough housewife who knew no one in publishing.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

Criticism is part of being in the marketplace. If you can't take a bit of criticism, you shouldn't bother publishing a book.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.

Some major American publishing houses still seek work by foreign writers.

In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

Of course, people say maybe there are some self-published books out there that shouldn't be out there. Well, it's the same with conventional publishing.

If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.