“Thanks so much for your letter. I am very glad to hear you have a novel that will be out in November. I hope you won’t have as much trouble about keeping people from having parties for you as I am having. Around here if you publish the number of whiskers on the local pigs, everybody has to give you a tea. If you don’t send me a copy of your book, I will go to the extreme of buying one.”

Flannery O'Connor

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“Your local bookstore can’t survive as a showroom.”

Stuart Bernstein

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“So amazon knuckles the Justice Dept to knuckle Apple and the publishers for price fixing. Why? Amazon wants to charge $9.99 for every book, as if it were an undifferentiated commodity. Intellectual property is not frozen orange juice.”

Mary Karr

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“There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.”

Donald Barthelme

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“I’ve discovered that one’s ‘ideal editor’ changes as one ages. At 83, with one eye gone and a lot of my hearing, my ideal editor is a young woman, preferably a pretty one, who doesn’t necessarily know anything about prose but who is a good driver and willing to take me on long journeys in my car.”

E. B. White

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“In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top.”

Jonathan Lethem

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“I need an adjective.”

Leonard B. Stern

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“(Twice this week I have been sent manuscripts of books that remind their editors, according to their covering letters, of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, ‘This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.’ That never happens.)”

Nick Hornby

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“It’s an underground classic. That means about 25 people have read it. But those 25 really, really like it.”

Jaimy Gordon

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“I’ve often described myself as a literary hermit crab. I scuttle around the currents of literature and find a home in someone’s imagined truth. When that imagined truth is my imagined truth, as a person, there is an amazing connection between the author and me. His voice becomes my voice.”

George Guidall

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“The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.”

Richard Price

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“The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”

Andrew Sullivan

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“Count yourself lucky…You’re still promising until your first book’s out.”

Mary Karr

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