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"All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers."
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"We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!"

"The biggest threat to authors in this age is not plagiarism or poverty, it's obscurity."

"You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher."

"Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells."

"New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world-throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night."

"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 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."

"The breadth of the potential readership is also a factor."

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy."

"I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped."
Explore more quotes by Donald E. Westlake

"I loved it, but social reality impeded. Now I wander in here at 9 in the morning or so, and come back for a while in the afternoon. I am a very lenient boss."

"I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way."

"If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all."

"If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers."

"When Stark isn't off sulking somewhere, or whatever he's doing when he won't return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind."

"Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote."

"A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview."
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