Literary Community Quotes

People don't come out for book events. They want to feel an emotion and be entertained.

It's not like publishing is perfect. Far from it. The industry is struggling to adapt and survive, and it's incredibly frustrating trying to break in.

I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.

When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

I find booksellers comforting - they're my people.

I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

I remember the days of sitting at book signings, playing with my pen when no one would come, and still I even then thought I was living the dream, because I had a book out.

I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up.

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.

The only people who have never had a problem with me speaking in their venues are independent bookstores and libraries. Universities and humanities councils have canceled me, but never an independent bookstore.

'The Paris Review's mandate has been the same for fifty years. First and foremost, this magazine is for writers; the editors' task is to support and celebrate them, especially at the beginning of their careers, but also as they move forward, venturing stories that are creative, risky, new.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

I love bookstores. I love the energy in a bookstore and the smell of the paper.

Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.

France is very welcoming to foreign writers.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.