top of page
.png){kind=small}
"He left to do whatever editors do."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Publishing quotes
"We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!"
"The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are."
"I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online."
"McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object."
"Author's WarningIf you're buying this book as a gift for your grandma or a kid, you should be aware that it contains cusswords as well as tasteful depictions of cannibalism and people in their forties having sex. Don't blame me. I told you."
"Wanted has gone into second, third and fourth printings of the individual issues and the north American printings of Wanted #1 are now close to 100,000."
"I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets."
"I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped."
"Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells."
"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively, that was merely an unintended side effect."
"For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere)."
"Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being."
"Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time."
"And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."
"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."
"Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh."
bottom of page