Manning Marable Quotes

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

Anne Romaine collected her own parallel archive to [Alex] Haley.

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

I'm so busy writing and editing two books a year that I don't have time for painting anymore.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

[Alex] Haley's objective was quite different. Haley was a republican. He was an integrationist. He was very opposed to black nationalism.

Frequently, an author gets "orphaned" at a publisher. What this means is that an editor buys their book, then ends up getting fired, promoted, or transferred to a different job somewhere else. It sucks for the author because suddenly the person who liked your book enough to buy it isn't around to help you edit and promote it.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Someone told me that each equation I included in my book would halve the sales. I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = MC squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers.

... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books--with one hand.

Everyone should have the right to go off and do their music or do their books. The people who are in the position to censor they're really not down to reality where that certain artists are coming from.

At first, I felt bad judging an entire state by one county political official, but then I found out Morrison had also helped screen public school textbooks, a topic which is another chapter in my book. The Alamo is managed by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, a group whose members can claim a relative who was living in Texas during the revolution. The fight over mismanagement of the Alamo has been going on for years.

If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison .... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Books are like sapphires; they must be polished - polished! or else you insult your readers.

I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I'm dying, I'll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn't bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

[My mom] is quite the strict editor. I feel like maybe she has more of the old-school editing style, which really works in picture books, because you don't want to articulate anything in words that is already shown through the pictures.

Malcolm X had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that [Alex] Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions.

I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future.

[Alex] Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books.