If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it a...
Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted ...
I am always making sketches of how information should look or mapping out a marketing campaign. When I present my notes, people start responding to them. Desktop publishing makes everything look slick. When you present sketches, it helps start the di...
We see them when they come to New York. They stay at my wife's apartment. We have quite a correspondence with them at all times. They play a very important role, the authors in the firm, because so much of the material we publish is suggested by them...
Dr. Martin Bettes: My wife is Melvin Udall's publisher. She said that I was to take excellent care of this little guy because you are urgently needed back at work. What kind of work do you do? Carol Connelly: I'm a waitress. Beverly Connelly: In Manh...
Nicholas: And you really believe that just because you publish children's books, people are going to care about my reputation? You can have pictures of me wearing nipple rings, butt-fucking Captain Kangaroo. The only thing they care about is the stoc...
Phillip Morgan: Rupert only publishes books HE likes... usually philosophy. Janet Walker: Oh. Small print, big words, no sales. Brandon Shaw: Rupert's extremely radical. Do you know that he selects his books on the assumption that people not only can...
Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry compet...
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. Afte...
When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding inquiries about whether 'Nixonland' - the name of the book I published that spring about the origins of the generation of...
Officer Ryan: You know, you don't like me, that's fine, I'm a prick, my father doesn't deserve to suffer like this, he was a janitor, struggled his whole life, saved enough to start his own company, twenty three employees, all of them black, paid the...
We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and he...
Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing-- you?' 'Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I to write--I can't help it at times...
What most people don't realize is that when you decide to write and publish a book, it's not for stardom, or for fame, it's because you have a story that's inside of you that is dying to get out! You don't just come up with it one day, it's a thought...
Readers of Darwin's life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an entirely different light ...
Very much on the defensive, I admitted that I liked to read. "Sure," Sammy said, "I never said I had anything against reading books..." "The publishers will be relieved to know that," I tried to insert, but Sammy was too quick for me and was already ...
In 2011, I did an internship in Seven Dials, a junction in London where seven roads come together. I'd given up on writing after multiple rejections for my first novel, and I was starting to consider a career in publishing instead, but Seven Dials ga...
Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no u...
I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be co...
My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After ...
The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I’d a...
