Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
“If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”
"Elizabeth Hand on Mortal Love at HarperCollins (2004)
Context: I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.
“With all of my books I’m interested in where people come from in relation to who they are…”
On her writing interests in “Bernardine Evaristo: ‘I want to put presence into absence’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/27/bernardine-evaristo-girl-woman-other-interview in The Guardian (2019 Apr 27)
“Books are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves!”
The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)
Context: These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.
Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (29 January 1886)
