USAGE, n. The First Person of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as long as the fashion.
People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.
As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.
I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
The newest books are those that never grow old.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.
Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.
A television picture or a movie might be lost forever, but your book is waiting.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
A classic is a book that remains in print
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.
I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.
When you're writing a book, you don't want it to be overly trendy because you want people to enjoy it for years and refer back to it.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
The average trade book has a shelf life of between milk and yogurt, except for books by any member of the Irving Wallace family - they have preservatives.
Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.
Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit. The new releases are always going to bolster the old releases.
