Gardner Dozois Quotes

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

When I'm deciding to read a book, I never open to the first chapter, because that's been revised and worked over 88 times. I'll just turn to the middle of the book, to the middle of a chapter, and just read a random page and I'll know right away whether this is the real deal or not.

Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.

I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?" If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?" Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story.

I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationshipbetween prolificness and quality.

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

I never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day?