“This is all meaningless... sometimes it’s like, 'oh my God, the news', and then I pick up my book and suddenly I’m reading about ten thousand years ago again, and, wow, that gives you a perspective.”— Camille Paglia, nymag.com
“I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.”— Terry Pratchett, amazon.com
“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books—but by whether or not future generations read her.”— Evgenia Peretz, vanityfair.com
“There aren't any big words in [my] book... And it's not that I don't know those words. I just don't talk like that.”— Cat Marnell, rollingstone.com
“Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“I think the tech corporations are like the nineteenth-century coal magnates, and the freelance writers are like the people slaving in the mines, the only difference being that the tech corporations can't stop congratulating themselves on how they've liberated everybody.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“The publishing industry looks a lot like one of these bestselling teenage dystopias: white and full of people destroying one another to survive.”— Daniel Jose Older, amazon.com
“The market, I am told, just doesn't demand this kind of book... because white kids won't buy a book with a black kid on the cover -- or so The Market says, despite millions of music albums that are sold in just that way.”— Daniel Jose Older, amazon.com
“I expected that once I sold my first novel, the hardest part would be over...I also expected that becoming a successful novelist would be difficult; that is the only expectation that has turned out to be true.”— Malinda Lo, amazon.com
“Plenty of authors who appear to be successful in public are, in private, struggling to get by on dwindling royalty payments, or working an unglamorous day job, or are married to someone with a much more reliable income.”— Malinda Lo, amazon.com
“I mean, sure, do what you love, but do it on the nights-and-weekends plan.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But look, a lot of the people who ask me for advice, they're not just asking about how to be a writer. Because everyone knows that: How to be a writer is: you write all the time, and you read all the time, and eventually maybe you'll write something worth reading. The question people are really aski…”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“When I do those books, I know it's a product. I know it's going to be shelved in a certain part of the bookstore. So what I try to do is inject it with as much artfulness and as much of myself and as much honesty as I can. But it never leaves me, the fact that I'm making something that's going to ha…”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com
“But what I quickly realized is, I'm not quitting my day job. I'm swapping one day job for another.”— Austin Kleon, amazon.com