20th-century Publisher Quotes

Stan Lee

Hugh Hefner

John F. Kennedy Jr.

Dave Eggers

Larry Flynt

Henry Luce

Nizar Qabbani

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

For more than eight decades, Washington has been my hometown.... It is a city that offers me more people — more different kinds of people — than I could otherwise possibly have come to know in a lifetime: the native Washingtonian, the local merchant, the foreign diplomat, the ever-present tourist, the public servant, the journalist, the president, the friend.

Katharine Graham

This modernizing experiment seems to have something diabolic about it. Everything that was becomes rejected in the name of a modernity that assumes the nature of a fiction, an illusion, a devilish apparition. To a greater or lesser extent this applies to all the postcommunist countries.

Andrzej Stasiuk

People assume you slept your way to the top. Frankly, I couldn't sleep my way to the middle.

Nicaragua is becoming the least expensive Caribbean destination...

I'm also told that the latest popular game in America is called Incest—all the family can join in!

Rupert Hart-Davis

A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.

We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.

On journalism

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.

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

Michael Joseph (publisher)

MARVEL IS A CORNUCOPIA OF FANTASY, A WILD IDEA, A SWASHBUCKLING ATTITUDE, AN ESCAPE FROM THE HUMDRUM AND PROSAIC. IT'S A SERENDIPITOUS FEAST FOR THE MIND, THE EYE, AND THE IMAGINATION, A LITERATE CELEBRATION OF UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY, COUPLED WITH A TOUCH OF REBELLION AND AN INSOLENT DESIRE TO SPIT IN THE EYE OF THE DRAGON.

They (fans) respond mostly to what WWE trains them to respond to. An ankle lock gets over because Kurt Angle does the ankle lock and everyone submits to it. A triangle by Undertaker doesn't get over because WWE has never trained the fans to accept that as a finish because no one ever taps to it. And it was the same thing when Shamrock was in WWE.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers can hear the sounds.

Whatever our background, culture or race, what rewards us most powerfully and consistently are the most deceptively simple abilities of all: the ability to be kind.

Stephanie Dowrick

Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned

Roberto Calasso

I'd spent so many years doing things I didn't really want to do for people I didn't really like.

Only when you're willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.

Write on a subject you love. Your profit center should also be your passion center.

About the only certainty, other than uncertainty, in fly fishing is that a fly won't catch fish if it stays in its box.

Arnold Gingrich

The qualities that made for success in a fighter-pilot seemed to be just those sturdy qualities that made for success in other professions; observation, initiative, determination, courage, including the courage to run away. In course of time it appeared that men who had a private axe to grind beyond the public axe of the King's enemies were especially successful.

James R. A. Bailey

Feeding the media is like training a dog. You can't throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over again until it learns.

Andrew Breitbart

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

Because I really care about homosexuals…and I want them to know that they will face a horrible judgment.