Monday, September 28, 2009

That's Quotable!

I'm reading Ariel Gore's book "How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead," because it was fifty-cents at the used book sale and she's a close friend of Shannon's (you might remember him as the scofflaw that accompanied me on the Light Rail adventure).

And this marvelous passage at the start of one of her chapters—by Doris Lessing—made me laugh and say "Hell yeah." What a nutty industry.
And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, "Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages—all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person." -Doris Lessing

2 comments:

John Bligh said...

Now if all those people could figure out how to eliminate the writer from that equation completely, they would!

Ed Ward said...

I've heard that chimpanzees and typewriters are a promising new technology, but the banana overhead is prohibitively expensive.