Active Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

One of the great business virtues of high publishing was that it was a difficult business to enter. You had to stand for something.

— Michael Wolff

“You know what a publisher is? He’s a failed writer whose father was rich enough that he’s able to appropriate other people’s talents.”

— Joël Dicker

“My publishers, two Catalan brothers with an inherited income, took me out to lunch to inform me that the first print run would be…

— Francine Prose

“He had started out the way nearly all writers do, and I'd seen it a hundred times--amateurs transformed into gibbering wrecks by actually being…

— Colin Bateman

“Readers have some peculiar notions about the status of writers, the most foolish of which is that writers are treated like royalty by their…

— Reed Farrel Coleman

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest…

— Nicholson Baker

“Authors today need a publisher as much as they need a tapeworm in their guts.”

— Rayne Hall

“We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and…

— Virginia Woolf

No publication is a staple of life. It's not bread and water. You have to make it noteworthy in people's minds and even in…

— Timothy White

“Now that reading and writing are universal accomplishments, books are not bought so freely as they were about 1820. . . . [I]n fact,…

— Andrew Lang

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address…

— Kiran Desai

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

— Fay Weldon