“Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.”
"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.
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Elizabeth Hand 33
American writer 1957Related quotes
Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
“There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”
Source: The Humans
“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.
“If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”
“I've never known a case yet where worry helped.”
Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 18
“Logic is the most useful tool of all the arts. Without it no science can be fully known.”
Summa Logicae (c. 1323), Prefatory Letter, as translated by Paul Vincent Spade (1995) http://www.pvspade.com/Logic/docs/ockham.pdf
Context: Logic is the most useful tool of all the arts. Without it no science can be fully known. It is not worn out by repeated use, after the manner of material tools, but rather admits of continual growth through the diligent exercise of any other science. For just as a mechanic who lacks a complete knowledge of his tool gains a fuller [knowledge] by using it, so one who is educated in the firm principles of logic, while he painstakingly devotes his labor to the other sciences, acquires at the same time a greater skill at this art.
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, p. 148