Top 100 Quotes About Publishing
#1. Writing a novel takes creativity. Publishing it takes courage
M.L. Kilian
#2. All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.
Ava DuVernay
#3. What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time.
Robert Gottlieb
#4. It's always helpful to look outside of the web for your inspiration, to places where you might not at first expect to find a solution. The world is a collage of inspiration, from newspapers, magazine publishing, and advertising to product design, architecture and the fine arts.
Andy Clark
#5. Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn't be publishing anyone at all after a while.
Victoria Strauss
#6. The formation of the News America Publishing Group will lead to greater editorial excitement, new business opportunities and greater efficiencies and coordination.
Peter Chernin
#7. For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...
Rebecca Solnit
#8. One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making.
Sarah Jessica Parker
#9. Libraries) Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Maria Bonn and Mike Furlough. As Courant and Jones
Alice Crawford
#10. The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.
Hanya Yanagihara
#11. Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age - its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.
Matt Mullenweg
#12. The anomaly is that, as a publishing venture, comics are not doing very well. As a venture that supplies other media, they're incredible.
Dennis O'Neil
#13. I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.
Dave Eggers
#15. I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.
Jay McInerney
#16. It's called publishing. It's how smart people install new ideas into other peoples brains.
Steven Magee
#17. I'm really good at making software for publishing.
Matt Mullenweg
#18. Print-on-demand and electronic self-publishing options have made it easy for anyone to set up a business as a publisher whether they know what they're doing or not.
Victoria Strauss
#19. The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.
Ben Katchor
#20. There's an old saying: 'No piece of writing is ever finished, it's just abandoned.' But my own rule is: No piece of work is done until you want to kill everyone involved in the publishing process, especially yourself.
Chuck Palahniuk
#21. There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.
James Frey
#22. If you want to succeed in indie publishing, be prepared to work your ass off and demonstrate patience. Writers who aren't willing to do those two things will fail. Period.
Sean Platt
#23. OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2 ... priceless.
Salman Rushdie
#24. I realized very young that I loved reading and wanted to do something related to books/reading for a living. I didn't think of publishing, really, until I was out of college.
Ellen Datlow
#25. I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.
Marguerite Young
#26. My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.
Harry Lloyd
#27. A new regulation for the publishing industry: The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.
Calvin Trillin
#28. The successful publishing house is the one that can guess ahead, not the one that imitates the past.
Helen Jacobs
#29. I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.
Cassandra Clare
#30. When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#31. I really started self-publishing on a serious level in 2002. Those smaller books did well, ended up moving from doing a series to compiling everything into a trade paperback in about 2005.
Tim Fish
#32. I'm especially interested in projects from authors who were always wonderful writers but who got stuck in the midlist mire due to the challenges of traditional publishing.
Teresa Medeiros
#33. Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.
Michelle M. Pillow
#34. But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing. We blame them for everything.
Gabrielle Zevin
#35. We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour..
James Packer
#36. 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.
Virginia Henley
#37. One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#38. I would have died, before a literary agent ever committed to my book. This is why I chose to empower myself by self publishing.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#39. When self-publishing started, it was mostly people who really couldn't write. And they just wanted to get their book out, and they couldn't get traditional deals.
Caroline Leavitt
#40. New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
#41. I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing.
Jack Kirby
#42. Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.
Evgeny Morozov
#43. Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.
Dan Brown
#44. As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self. Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.
Gabriel Zaid
#45. One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.
Walter Kirn
#46. At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
Joseph Kanon
#47. It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.
Jim C. Hines
#48. A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.
Dave Morris
#49. Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.
Iain Banks
#50. With Instapaper, I can take a few months off. I can't stop publishing 'The Magazine' for two months and work on something else.
Marco Arment
#51. The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#52. It's my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don't shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn't. That's why I was rejected for years and years.
Patrick Rothfuss
#53. Sometimes, I'll hear from other writers or folks in the publishing industry that my books are rule-breakers, which I take as a compliment.
Kristan Higgins
#54. One of the most refreshing changes I've seen in recent years is the blending of genres - the pushing past the hard-and-fast lines of specific publishing categories.
Andrea Davis Pinkney
#55. Well, you know, News Corp is the only real media global - that has a global presence that's involved in TV production, in movies, in publishing, in newspapers, digital media, et cetera. So for a company like that to function, clearly it does not depend only on Rupert Murdoch or James Murdoch.
Al-Waleed Bin Talal
#57. Planet Lucy Press? I incorporated myself to deal with publishing and was calling myself Big Bang Incorporated, which of course has to do with the Big Bang at the beginning of creation.
Rob Walton
#58. It's interesting that the book publishing industry, on the iPad, has much more flexibility than the music industry had.
Edgar Bronfman Jr.
#59. We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.
Julian Assange
#60. Write a lot and don't think about publishing - just the writing.
Jeffrey Brown
#61. As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.
Brad Stone
#62. Okay, are you really 'experimenting'? How do you know if you're really experimenting? You're working on it methodically and you're publishing the results! It's not an experiment if you don't publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?
Bruce Sterling
#63. I feel very discouraged with the state of gay and lesbian publishing because I don't feel like we're really welcome in the mainstream and then you get ghettoized and put on some lesbian book club reading list where you don't want to be either.
Ali Liebegott
#64. I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.
Adrian Tomine
#65. Independent publishing gives everyone a voice, and those with a voice to which people inherently want to listen will find a way to the top.
Ben Clymer
#66. Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.
Daniel Suarez
#67. The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more disgraceful by publishing it.
Karl Marx
#68. Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.
Nicholas Sparks
#69. There's a marvelous peace in not publishing, there's a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.
J.D. Salinger
#70. I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It's a challenge to the powers that be. It's saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
Alan Lightman
#71. People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
#72. I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics ... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.
Marjane Satrapi
#73. I was writing for a publishing company in this old building right next to the RCA Victor Studio in Nashville. We were on the top floor, and Combine Music was on the bottom floor. I was friends with all those guys.
Donnie Fritts
#74. Then l learned to play guitar and l started writing songs and my mother formed for me a publishing business, so we started publishing and managing artists.
Tommy Rettig
#75. I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.
Barry Diller
#76. When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing.
Matthew Pearl
#77. Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.
Rodman Philbrick
#78. At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.
Jose Saramago
#79. I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.
Anita Diament
#80. MADELINE SHEEHAN WILL BE PUBLISHING ALL HER BOOKS IN ALL FORMATS FROM NOW UNTIL HER UNTIMELY DEATH BY HEART ATTACK (AT A VERY YOUNG AGE) DUE TO GOODREADS!
Madeline Sheehan
#81. Basically, there's a good friend of mine who works at EMI Publishing, a publishing company. He had asked me - he was like, you know, do you know this girl, Amy Winehouse? She's in New York for a day. She's kind of meeting people to maybe work with on her second album.
Mark Ronson
#82. It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.
Jackson Browne
#83. A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.
Jane Green
#84. The real important thing about Digital-Original publication goes beyond the fact that authors make more money off each sale than through traditional publishing. It's that we get to bypass a system of gatekeepers who have more than 'quality' as criteria for what they choose.
Michael A. Stackpole
#85. Because publishing is becoming more business-oriented each day with more examination of the bottom line, it's harder to break out than ever.
Nicholas Sparks
#86. In essence, Zizek's procedure here is no different in principle from that of Husserl, who wrote and rewrote voluminous drafts and was continually "introducing" the project of transcendental phenomenology. The one thing that has changed is that Zizek is publishing his drafts as he goes.
Adam Kotsko
#87. After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.
Joan Larkin
#88. There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates.
Alan Moore
#89. With the movies, people are not going to wait around. The deadline is a deadline. In publishing it's more a polite suggestion.
David Benioff
#90. In 1981, Ms. Ebtekar was made editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper 'Kayhan International.' The man who gave her the job was Mr. Khatami, who was then head of the Kayhan publishing house.
Elaine Sciolino
#91. I will continue my involvement in politics through Lord Ashcroft Polls and my political publishing interests: Conservative Home, Biteback Publishing and Dods.
Michael Ashcroft
#92. I do work a lot. I mean, most of my income, I would say, comes from live performances. And then you've got publishing, you've got record royalties.
Elton John
#93. If I have done great things it's because I was standing in the closet of smart men taking notes and then publishing their ideas as my own.
Isaac Newton
#94. Books have a publishing standard, and every Indie Author is responsible to their readers in making sure those standards are met or exceeded.
Eeva Lancaster
#95. General Mills Editorial Director: Jeff Nowak Publishing
Anonymous
#96. I didn't really start publishing books until I was 40 because I was busy being a McDonald's employee. So there's always a sense of trying to make up for lost time.
Jerry Stahl
#97. From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
Joseph Bruchac
#98. [On working with James Joyce:] So, either you run your publishing business far away, where your writer can't get at it, or you publish right alongside of him - and have much more fun - and much more expense.
Sylvia Beach
#99. It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.
Jay McInerney
#100. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
Julian Assange
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
