A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

Editing is the most companionable form of education.

Television wrecked the short-story branch of the industry, and now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on someone's first novel is good money down a rat hole.

An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff.

Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.

Editing is the same as quarreling with writers- same thing exactly.

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

What we publishers think is that our function is to bring everything out into the open, on the theory that we have an adult population that knows values, or can learn them, and let them decide.

The job of editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.

Since the discovery of printing, knowledge has been called to power, and power has been used to make knowledge a slave.

A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.

What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.

Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A Book's a Book, altho' there's nothing in't.

Things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.