
From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book
Source: Howl and Other Poems
From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book
“It is impossible to publish your book, and it will not be published in the next 200 years.”
1960s
“The publishers profess to be the agents of heaven in establishing virtue”
Quoted in Henry Fowles Pringle (1939), The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, referring to a postal rate increase affecting popular magazines.
Attributed
Context: The publishers profess to be the agents of heaven in establishing virtue and therefore that they ought to receive some subsidy from the government. I can ask no stronger refutation to this claim … than the utterly unscrupulous methods pursued by them in seeking to influence Congress on this subject.
“When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.”
"A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1
“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual.”
"A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics (April 1928)
Context: A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 56