Scorn by Parris Matthew;

Author:Parris, Matthew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Writers, Publishers and Critics

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

A bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

Ernest Hemingway on writers

Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.

Walter Bagehot

Thank you for the manuscript; I shall lose no time in reading it.

Benjamin Disraeli’s standard reply to authors who sent him unsolicited copies of their books

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

John Farrar

I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettiness, without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without any intermediate parasite.

George Bernard Shaw

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Adage

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Raymond Chandler, letter to his British publisher

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with irrational fear of life become publishers.

Cyril Connolly

Every author, however modest, keeps an outrageous vanity chained like a madman within the padded cell of his breast.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Authors are easy to get on with – if you’re fond of children.

Michael Joseph, publisher

A great author, notwithstanding his Dictionary is imperfect, his Rambler pompous, his learning common, his ideas vulgar, his Irene a child of mediocrity, his genius worldly, his politics narrow and his religion bigoted.

Robert Potter, a critic, on Samuel Johnson

Chuang Tzu was born in the 4th century before Christ. The publication of this book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature.

Now-forgotten critic

Plato is a bore.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.

Thomas Babington Macaulay on Socrates

A crawling and disgusting parasite, a base scoundrel, and pander to unnatural passions.

William Cobbett on Virgil

Every man with a belly full of the classics is an enemy of the human race.

Henry Miller

A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.

Brander Matthews. Attrib.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Stephen Leacock, Homer and Humbug

Twitter is unspeakably irritating … It’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.

Portentous American novelist Jonathan Franzen

Lighten up, Franzo.

India Knight, tweeting in response

Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen.

Jonathan Franzen

Google is not a synonym for research.

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code

Calling Jeffrey Archer’s fictional characters cardboard is an insult to the British packaging industry.

Peter Preston

Googling yourself is like opening the door to a room full of people telling you how shit you are.

Armando Iannucci’s fictional MP Peter Mannion, in The Thick of It

All the universities and all the old writers put together are less talented than my arsehole.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.