Quotes About Literature

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

Children's publishing is the jewel in the crown of British publishing.

Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.

Writers keep writing and publishers publishing - it never grows boring.

Publishing is not my world.

I love digital books. And I actually started digital-first publishing back in 2005.

I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.

I have my own publishing company called 'I Am McLovin Publishing.'

If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.

Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture.

I started rereading 'The Dutchman' - I kind of just pulled it off the shelf.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

'Jane Eyre' must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And 'Kristin Lavransdatter,' and 'Lorna Doone' when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it.

I am a member of the London Library, and on almost every single job I do, there is some benefit to be had in going there and pulling two or three books off the shelves.

Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.'

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

Everyone knows robots write the best books and make the best music. Just look at Daft Punk.

Puns are a form of humor with words.