Closets Quote by Anonymous

Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

— John W. Campbell

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over…

— Anita Diament

Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

— Fay Weldon

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make…

— James Lasdun

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Let's not pretend there isn't a huge industry driven by the choices made by editors and writers who decide what a story is.

— Tom Hanks

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…

— Walter Jon Williams

I have to trust that if a story is strong, it can find its readership, and good editors can steer me well.

— Julie Berry

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

— Jim Harrison

Publishers never tell writers anything. They're all crazy and they drive me crazy.

— Anne Bernays

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work.…

— Jonathan Lethem

People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market's changing so fundamentally because of…

— Denise Mina