Maxwell Perkins Quotes

18 quotes in 264 categories

• Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don't put too much trust in them.
• The book belongs to the author.
• If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent…
• Learn about writing from reading. That is the right way to do it.
• You have to throw yourself away when you write.
• Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it…
• You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it, and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.
• Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.
• I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but…
• I do not think anyone can read War and Peace too much. I read it six times...
• It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great…
• Of the whole public not a handful can understand the artist's point of view or the writer's conscience.
• What we publishers think is that our function is to bring everything out into the open, on the theory that we have an adult population…
• It often puzzles me when people think that matters connected with sex ought to be suppressed. Sex itself cannot be suppressed, and the efforts to…
• You are all right on time, except for the fact that time is the enemy of us all, and especially of the writer.
• I do not think you should read about writing while you are writing.
• Writing, like drawing is an art, and whatever conveys the meaning is justified.
• Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer, when he tried to write of some particular day, he would…

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