Publication Impact Quotes

There's literary creation and literary business. When I first got something accepted, it gave my life a validation it didn't otherwise have.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

I had never seen a trace of a threat to the national security from the publication.

You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. [...] You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.

Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.

The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.

No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.