Literary Agency Quotes

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.

After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press.

I don't have an agent - I have the William Morris Agency.

We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can't imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

The following Wednesday, I opted to go with Random House.

I have my own publishing company called 'I Am McLovin Publishing.'

I've come to see that these politicians that release books - no way are they actually writing those books. Not when they are working fulltime, too. There's no way. That's their name on the book, but it's not their work. I'm sure of that. There's no way.

When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

No, I don't have an agent. I'm hoping to get one soon.

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

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

Unlike a state, a writer cannot plead the historical necessity of his actions.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

I got an American agent. I don't know what to think about that.

In the early 1980s, I spent a year working as an assistant at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

Planet Lucy Press? I incorporated myself to deal with publishing and was calling myself Big Bang Incorporated, which of course has to do with the Big Bang at the beginning of creation.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...

I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter.

Her sister, Holly McGhee, is an agent, and she's my agent in New York. She's Alison's agent too. Even though Alison lives here in Minneapolis, I met Alison through Holly, when Holly came to Minneapolis to visit Alison.

Agents will read unpublished work because they might make money, and that's their job. It isn't mine.

I don't have to do anything. The character is shaped on the page.

Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?

Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way.