Publishers Quotes

1. "There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor."
Author: A. J. Liebling

2. "Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out."
Author: Anthony Horowitz

3. "("we appreciated the intricately thought-out, detailed universe you've created for your story." ~Arthur A. Levine Books (publishers of The Harry Potter series.)) about my book!"
Author: Arthur A. Levine Books

4. "I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals, without a thought of those of editors or publishers."
Author: C. S. Forester

5. "Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they're as uncomfortable as I am."
Author: Charles Frazier

6. "As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers."
Author: Cyril Connolly

7. "Once publishers got interested in it, it was a year in developing, and it was launched, I think, in 1960. But Willie Lumpkin didn't last long - it only last a little better than a year, maybe a year and a half."
Author: Dan DeCarlo

8. "So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.'" Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, "The Naked and the Dead."
Author: Dorothy Parker

9. "I earnestly hope that all children will spoil this book by painting the illustrations. I wanted to do this myself but the publishers would not let me. But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

10. "—Amy said that would be an imprudent expense; but as soon as he had got a good price for a book. Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!NEW GRUB STREET"
Author: George Gissing

11. "If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves."
Author: George Orwell

12. "I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels."
Author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante

13. "Authors change publishers because it's like being married for a long time and suddenly you want to go out and have a wild affair! No, not seriously, sometimes the deal is more interesting with a new publisher, and other times they have more enthusiasm for your books."
Author: Jackie Collins

14. "Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing."
Author: Jasper Fforde

15. "I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them."
Author: Jean M. Auel

16. "It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house."
Author: Jerry Spinelli

17. "I did not buy a book called Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to 'Tolkien at his best.' The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn't a comparison anyone could make, except to say 'Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.' I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul's Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Simarillion.The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it's perfect."
Author: Jo Walton

18. "Leave off driving your composers. It might prove to be as dangerous as it is generally unnecessary. After all, composing cannot be turned out like spinning or sewing. Some respected colleagues (Bach, Mozart, Schubert) have spoilt the world terribly. But if we can't imitate them in the beauty of their writing, we should certainly beware of seeking to match the speed of their writing. It would also be unjust to put all the blame on idleness alone. Many factors combine to make writing harder for us (my contemporaries), and especially me. If, incidentally, they would use us poets for some other purpose, they would see that we are thoroughly and naturally industrious dispositions . . . . I have no time: otherwise I should love to chat on the difficulty of composing and how irresponsible publishers are."
Author: Johannes Brahms

19. "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it."
Author: John Lennon

20. "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."
Author: Karl Marlantes

21. "My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days."
Author: Laura Hillenbrand

22. "Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing."
Author: Laurence J. Peter

23. "So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job."
Author: Lee Child

24. "The good people who are publishing this book have a concern that they have expressed to me. The concern is that readers like yourself will read my history of the Baudelaire orphans and attempt to imitate some of the things they do. So at this point in the story, in order to mollify the publishers - the word 'mollify' here means 'get them to stop tearing their hair out in worry' - please allow me to give you a piece of advice, even though I don't know anything about you. The piece of advice is as follows: If you ever need to get to Curdled Cave in a hurry, do not, under any circumstances, steal a boat and attempt to sail across Lake Lachrymose during a hurricane, because it is very dangerous and the chance of your survival are practically zero."
Author: Lemony Snicket

25. "The primary reason more explicit material is now being published is twofold: there's money in the sale of sensational material, and few are trying to stop those who want to make this money, that is, unscrupulous publishers."
Author: Linda Harvey

26. "University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) and The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993)."
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

27. "The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too."
Author: Mark Millar

28. "I have female friends that get mails from publishers that read 'Hey. I heard you write about sex. This is a very popular topic now'."
Author: Martinus Hendrikus Benders

29. "Compulsive? I lived and breathed refunding, and my childrenbenefited with their wide variety of toys, balls, and T-shirtsI obtained through my hobby. It was all a big game, and one thatI played well. And I was not alone. While there was no estimateavailable on the number of people who were involved in refunding,Carol Backs, publisher of Money Maker magazine in thelate 1980s and chairman of a trade association of refund magazinepublishers, claimed that refund magazines were selling eighthundred thousand to one million subscriptions."
Author: Mary Potter Kenyon

30. "Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers - Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga - are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren't convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it."
Author: Mitch Lasky

31. "Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities -- their brute persistence."
Author: Nicholson Baker

32. "All indies self-publish but not all self-publishers are indie."
Author: Orna Ross

33. "I always figured it was best if I write my songs, take them to my publisher and just lay back. There used to be so many things going on - getting to the artist, getting to the publishers - you know, politics. I just didn't want to get mixed up in all of that."
Author: Otis Blackwell

34. "Mr Mowett,' called Stephen in the pause while the table was clearing to make room for the pudding, and pudding-wine—in this case Frontignan and Canary—was handing about, 'you were telling me about your publishers.'    'Yes, sir: I was about to say that they were the most hellish procrastinators—'    'Oh how dreadful,' cried Fanny. 'Do they go to—to special houses, or do they ...'    'He means they delay,' said Babbington.    'Oh."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

35. "…I had a good title already. My book was originally called Loser: A Brief History of Notable Failures. But American publishers don't like this. Losing is a bad thing in our country. It's not allowed."
Author: Paul Collins

36. "This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home."
Author: Paul Kane

37. "And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away."
Author: Peter Sotos

38. "If you look at the publishers I've worked with, generally, they're a great bunch. Creation is unlike any other publishing house you can think of. The people I've worked with have integrity and intelligence and, almost always, less money than ideas."
Author: Peter Sotos

39. "In the past the publishers I've worked with have been extremely generous. And in almost every case, have been people who believed in the work rather than the sales and marketing."
Author: Peter Sotos

40. "Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients' degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. "In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion." Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members."
Author: Randy Noblitt

41. "Except for a few small presses, most publishers are north of Ground Zero."
Author: Richard Curtis

42. "I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down."
Author: Richard Curtis

43. "The real effect of the WTC calamity has been depressed spirits, anxiety, and uncertainty among publishers, and of course those emotions are not restricted to publishers."
Author: Richard Curtis

44. "After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year."
Author: Robert Benchley

45. "It's always the end of the world," said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. "You could set your watch on it arriving." He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader," he said. "Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity." Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal. New York Times, 10/16/2011"
Author: Russell Grandinetti

46. "1. Why is it foolish to launch a new business with millions of dollars in TV ads?2. Are the market leaders in every industry more vulnerable to sudden successes by the competition than ever before?3. Should book publishers issue the paperback edition of a book before the hardcover?4. What's the single most important asset a company can create—and what is the simple thing that can kill it?5. Every ad needs to do one of two things to succeed...yet most ads do neither. What's the right strategy?6. Does the Net create a dynamic that fundamentally changes the way everything is marketed?7. How can every business...big and small...use ideavirus marketing to succeed?"
Author: Seth Godin

47. "The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects."
Author: Toni Morrison

48. "Console game publishing has become more like theatrical release film-making and it is very hard if you are not one of the major publishers, and even for them it is hard unless they are working with major game brands."
Author: Trip Hawkins

49. "That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door."
Author: Walter Jon Williams

50. "There, stacked high on his desk, was a tower of paper. Thick slabs of manuscript. Slush. Unsolicited, unagented, unloved. This was where dreams came to die. Book proposals, cover letters, entire manuscripts – they gathered like so much detritus on the desks of publishers everywhere."
Author: Will Ferguson

Publishers Quotes Pictures