Top 100 Published Quotes
#1. Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art.
Maria Popova
#2. Just as Huckleberry Finn was published, the first generation of African Americans raised in the postslavery era began to come of age. Among them were people with musical talent, and at first they went to work in minstrelsy, in the well-worn patterns of show business they'd inherited.
Dennis McNally
#3. My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.
Louis Begley
#4. I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.
Mal Peet
#5. White House political adviser Karl Rove was one of Robert Novak's sources for the 2003 disclosure of a CIA operative's identity, according to a story published today in "Duh" magazine.
Andy Borowitz
#6. Light control works; close control leads to overreaction, sometimes causing the machinery to break into pieces. In a famous paper "On Governors," published in 1867, Maxwell modeled the behavior and showed mathematically that tightly controlling the speed of engines leads to instability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. On the advice of my U.K. publishers, I chose a sexless anonymity and published my first five books under the semi-pseudonym, S. J. Bolton. I was happy. I could hide behind a genderless, classless persona and let my creepy, psychological murder-mysteries speak for themselves.
Sharon Bolton
#8. Lloyd Alexander's tales were written and published when I was in diapers. Decades later, they remain utterly timeless for me. I cannot recommend them enough.
James A. Moore
#9. 'The Paris Review' was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in 'The Paris Review,' and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure.
James Salter
#10. If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...
Barry James Hickey
#11. That which was published in the Law, the prophets, and psalms before "God was manifested in flesh"
looks forward to Jesus the Christ; what was published after Christ's ascension looks back to Him as "the Lord God of Israel" who "hath visited and redeemed His people" (Luke 1:68).
Tim Liwanag
#12. My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
Kate Christensen
#13. It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important ... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
Alice Walker
#14. I have no ghost writers. I personally write every message and every piece of published mail.
David Wilkerson
#15. Even if not a single picture is never published, they exist. And that means that we are recording the history of the human race. If that's all your doing, it still a very very worth while profession to be involved in.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#16. I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#17. Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.
Kent Haruf
#18. I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.
Patti Smith
#19. As a writer, I first felt successful before I was published.
Patrick Rothfuss
#20. It breaks my heart that we are always being nudged toward the most recently published books, when so many worthy books have gone unexplored.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
#21. What you cannot lay to rest
Must therefore be laid aside
From the poem "Moors Child" published in the poetry collection "Cats and Other Myths
J.S. Watts
#22. It took many months in court, but the tabloid eventually published a total retraction and paid substantial damages in an out-of-court settlement. The money went to the Special Olympics in Great Britain.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#23. My interest in science was always essentially limited to the study of principles ... That I have published so little is due to this same circumstance, as the great need to grasp principles has caused me to spend most of my time on fruitless pursuits.
Albert Einstein
#24. When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
William Gibson
#25. There's a difference between publicity and marketing. A lot of writers don't realize how much marketing goes on beyond the scenes, with sales reps and advanced reading copies, all that stuff that happens months before a book is published.
Victoria Strauss
#26. Bootlicking is only a way to get published, not to become a writer
Himmilicious
#27. When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. 'I lost one, too,' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)
John Irving
#28. I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Lynn Abbey
#29. For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.
Laura Miller
#30. I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.
Nalo Hopkinson
#31. If you're a bookworm and love to read popular fiction, and don't really care about who the author is, regardless if it is self-published or traditionally published, then Kindle Unlimited might be a good service for you.
K.D Techster
#32. You will not mistake the newspaperman - looks like a big turtle - published a letter meant to embarrass me.
George Hearst
#33. I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since.
Michael Scott
#34. I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.
Howard Gardner
#35. Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.
Terry Brooks
#36. There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
Sandra Cisneros
#37. After 'Click, Clack, Moo' was published, I was still practicing law and had no plans to make a career change.
Doreen Cronin
#38. Get your passion on the paper. Detach from the outcome. Forget about whether it's going to get published.
Wayne Dyer
#39. Graham Wallas has reminded us that writing as compared with speaking involves an impression at the second remove and reading an impression at the third remove. The voice of a second-rate person is more impressive than the published opinion of superior ability.
Harold Innis
#40. Could anyone fail to be depressed by a book he or she has published? Don't we always outgrow them the moment the last page has been written?
Mary Ritter Beard
#41. In 1952, when I was 15 and living on Governors Island, which was then First Army Headquarters, I encountered the newly-published 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Of course, that book became the iconic anti-establishment novel for my generation.
Lois Lowry
#42. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
Melinda Rucker Haynes
#43. A new study published by The British Medical Journal found that inactivity can kill you. I mean, these are the kind of findings that just scare the hell out of Congress.
Jay Leno
#44. I'm tired of the anonymity of being an unpublished author. I crave the anonymity of being self-published.
Tristan Durie
#45. The book the Ziff folks sent me as an example of their art was 'Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java,' 700 pages + CD-ROM, published February 1997. I was personally acquainted with more movie stars than people who might conceivably have wanted to buy this book or any book like it.
Philip Greenspun
#46. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in Great Britain by the London firm George Allen & Unwin on 29 July 1954; an American edition followed on 21 October of the same year, published
J.R.R. Tolkien
#47. I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.
Virginia Henley
#48. There's a word for an author who doesn't give up ... published.
J.A. Konrath
#49. I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.
Isabel Allende
#51. Newspapers across the country and the world have published cartoons that have gone beyond reasonable differences of opinion and expanded into the realm of antisemitism.
Gordon Smith
#52. New-Year's Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.
Joanna Southcott
#53. I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
Susanna Kearsley
#54. In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?
Gao Xingjian
#55. Just before I'd moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something.
Nora Ephron
#56. I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?
Richard Russo
#57. My first typewriter cost me $75. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to earn that money, or how proud I was of that object. I wrote my first books on it. They will never be published, but that's all right.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#58. I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
#59. As my editor had no desire to frighten readers with the Romanian pages, he had them translated and published the whole thing in French in 1984. It was only years later, in Romania, that I was able to publish the book as I wrote it.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#60. It's much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn't usually published or available.
Leila Janah
#61. As a self-published author, you have the choice. Embrace the power to create a book that is truly yours. Don't be a whiner or a copycat.
M.J. Rose
#62. In 1998, while serving two consecutive life sentences, Puente began corresponding with a writer named Shane Bugbee and sending him recipes which were subsequently published in a book called Cooking with a Serial Killer.
Call me crazy, but I wouldn't touch that food with a ten-foot pole.
Jodi Picoult
#63. I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.
Jessica Hagedorn
#64. Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.
John Connolly
#66. I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
Stacy Schiff
#67. My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read "how to write" books as they may make the process a bit quicker.
Katie Fforde
#68. Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
Wislawa Szymborska
#69. It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.
Oliver Harris
#70. Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.
Michel Faber
#71. For my father
John Standish Fforde
1920-2000
Who never knew I was to be published but would have been most proud nonetheless
and not a little surprised.
Jasper Fforde
#72. Only enter quotes from notable people. Generally, a person is notable if they have been the subject of published secondary source material which is reliable, intellectually independent, and independent of the subject.
Testy McTesterson
#73. I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'
Salman Rushdie
#74. I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.
Ann Powers
#75. In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.
Ma Jian
#76. When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!
Selima Hill
#77. [On refusing to allow photos to be published of herself and her children:] A lady's name should appear in print only three times, at her birth, marriage, and death.
Edith Roosevelt
#78. Now the interesting thing about the movie is that many of the questions it raised about the Warren Commission and its investigation were all investigated by our committee 13 years ago. We published our findings in 27 volumes of information and evidentiary material.
Louis Stokes
#79. I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.
Jilly Cooper
#80. I began writing late; my first articles and stories were published after I was thirty, and I was motivated by money. Money is not a bad motivation. The need to eat keeps us from laziness, and the fact that someone is willing to pay to read what we write assures us that we have indeed written.
M.V. Carey
#81. The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.
David Sedaris
#82. Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.
Tama Janowitz
#83. Quite a few books about decluttering are published in a year.
Marie Kondo
#84. I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
Jim Harrison
#85. An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it.
So choose your audience. Write something.
Atul Gawande
#86. Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals.
James A. Haught
#87. There are many traditionally published authors who have hated the cover their publisher's decided on. Or the title or the marketing or the advertising. But there was nothing they could do about it.
M.J. Rose
#88. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
James A. Owen
#89. Now, after I have published a few books, I can clearly feel the impact of censorship when I write. For example, I'll think of a sentence, and then realize that it will for sure get deleted. Then I won't even write it down.
Murong Xuecun
#90. As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
David Bergen
#91. I have had, like most women, a lifelong preoccupation with my weight. My first published short story was a love story between an elderly man and a very young morbidity obese woman.
Lori Lansens
#92. If I am thinking the same as everyone why bother pushing to get it published?
Chuck Eddy
#93. Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".
John Gribbin
#94. It's not just the books Alba craves, it's standing inside a place that houses millions of them. Libraries are Alba's churches, and the university library, containing one edition of every book ever published in England, is her cathedral.
Menna Van Praag
#95. You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.
Darin Strauss
#96. I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
Terry Pratchett
#97. A book gets rejected because it's not ready to be published.
Gina B. Nahai
#98. I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.
I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.
I refuse to let anything get in my way.
Randy Ingermanson
#99. My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.
Stephen Ambrose
#100. After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected.
Hjalmar Schacht
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