H. W. Brands Quotes

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

The history of America is the history of families moving.

I think the book business is really sitting on the greatest moment in the history of time. We are providing the stories to the hungry public. We have more avenues to do it than ever before.

I am a writer (and one day I'll be an author). For a long time I was a bookseller (who wrote) or a TV producer (who wrote), but for the last decade or so, its been "writer."

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

My idea was always to start with a small press and then move up to a national press. I had those goals for my career from the time I was a very young woman. I wanted to win a local award, then I wanted a state or national award. Small press, big press. Some women fantasize about their weddings, their husbands, and children. I fantasized about what I wanted to accomplish with my books.

Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.

I think I've learned over the years, because you'd have to be stupid not to, that when a book publisher gives you a deadline they're just kidding for the most part. I don't know what they do with it, it's like you send them your book and they just hold it in their hands for like six months and I don't know why, and you realize you probably had more time.

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

It is astonishing what you can do when you have a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance.

Usually kids who are talented have the brashness to think they can do anything, but they don't often get the chance to see how close they can come.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

I got on a high believing everything I would produce was going to sell at the rate I wanted.

I think book publishing is fun, but I also know I've been very lucky.

In Poland, for a while, my books all had cartoons on the cover. I trust my publishers in each country to know what works in their individual markets.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

The United States, per capita, at a certain period in its history, had the most junkies of any country ever in the world - right after the Civil War. The most brutal war, the greatest amount of casualties that America's ever had.

Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.

Greed can overtake smart.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Lifted up so high I disdained subjection, and thought one step higher would set me highest.

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.

Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.