Literary Advocacy Quotes

Here's the thing: Authors live or die by recommendations. [That's one of the reason I review so many books on Goodreads.] Giving books you love good reviews is one of the nicest things you can do for an author. What's more it's good for the entire community.

If what we want to do is promote reading and writing and publishing and making sure this is a business that keeps going - because it is a business! It's not just an art - then we have to take responsibility. I get sort of crazy and frothy when I think about this. It really matters.

In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in prayers, I believe in work. And my work is that of an author. My pen is my weapon.

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

The strange dilemma of the 'ethnic-fiction' writer is that you are supposed to carry a banner for your homeland, be a voice for it, and educate the rest of the world about it, but I think that's far too onerous a burden for any writer to bear.

Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

As the idealized mother, I might choose Irene Dunne as the mother in 'I Remember Mama' who strives and not just cooks and scrubs for her children, but who also acts as her daughter's literary agent.

It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.

MWA and The Author's Guild refused to accept me as a member.

What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.

I'm so glad that social media gives me a chance to do that, to celebrate books I love and help proselytize for books I love.