Adam Mansbach Quotes

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

I watch people who are not driven by creativity any more, and I think how dull it must be to produce the same kind of thing. If you don't feel you're reaching something new, then don't do it.

The entertainment business hasn't had a new idea in years.

We do things much the same way as we did 50, 60 or even 70 years ago. The answers may not be wrong, but we haven't experimented to see whether they are or not.

Once we start collecting, the more you have, the more it gets valuable and that will stop us from responding to the present and taking on new ideas what the artists are doing now.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

A lot of people get really stuck in this idea that everything's been done and there's nowhere left to go.

Normality is death.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.

I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

I have read their platform, and though I think there are some unsound places in it, I can stand upon it pretty well. But I see nothing in it both new and valuable. "What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.

Tradition" is very often an excuse word for people who don't want to change.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

Concert pianists are really afraid to try out the Beethoven Fourth Concerto if the Third happens to be their specialty. That's the piece they had such success with on Long Island, by George, and it will surely bring them success in Connecticut. So first there's tremendous conservatism. And then stagnation sets in. Or it certainly did in me.

You can't just keep bottling the same thing over and over again and think the audience isn't going to catch on.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.