Maxwell Perkins Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

Of the whole public not a handful can understand the artist's point of view or the writer's conscience.

Maxwell Perkins
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.

Maxwell Perkins
It is those people who know that they are right because some outside or higher power conveys the conviction to them who do the great damage in the world.

Maxwell Perkins
Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.

Maxwell Perkins
Learn about writing from reading. That is the right way to do it.

Maxwell Perkins
I do not think anyone can read War and Peace too much. I read it six times...

Maxwell Perkins
It often puzzles me when people think that matters connected with sex ought to be suppressed. Sex itself cannot be suppressed, and the efforts to do it, it seems to me, result in greater damage than it can do itself. After all, it was not an invention of man, but of God.

Maxwell Perkins
Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.

Maxwell Perkins