Quotes by Literary Agents

Be fearless. Be bold. Be Magic.
Eric Smith
Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped
Alan Sheinwald
A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.
Sterling Lord
What's your problem?""I don't have problems. I solve them.
John M. Cusick
I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language.
Sterling Lord
Most—but not all—of the writers I knew then were young men who cherished their independence, were unconcerned about job security, and were serious about their writing. They didn’t want to be anyone’s employee if it interfered with their writing. They were halfway or all the way outside the mainstream and were often not interested in becoming part of the burgeoning corporate society. They had more freedom than your average American.
Sterling Lord
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
Betsy Lerner
Why do yo keep doing this?""Because I've wanted to be with you for three years, okay? That's why.
Mandy Hubbard
There was real plasure to be had eating ice cream out of container and pickles out of a glass jar, standing up at the counter. I wondered whether the cravings associated with pregnancy were really only a matter of women feeling empowered to admit their odd longings to their husbands, to ask another person to bring them the eccentric combinations they'd long enjoyed in private.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.
Betsy Lerner
And by the way, if she constantly leaving you messages that she's in another castle...she's just not that into you. Move on.
Eric Smith
Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part. Even if that part is coughing to death from cigarettes, or being blown up young in a house with your mother watching. And even if it's to be that mother. Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to help him clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.
Bill Clegg
We are traveling down a path with no happy ending, and it's too late to turn around.
Mandy Hubbard
But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.
Betsy Lerner
Life's full of surprises, and they ain't all bad.
Barbara Rogan
It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.
Donald Maass
[A]s a parent you just have no idea what anything means. On some level everything your kids do and say is in code.
Bill Clegg
Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.
Betsy Lerner
Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.
Donald Maass
The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
Betsy Lerner
I knew I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
Bill Clegg
You were twisting your wet hair up into a ponytail, and then you saw us, and you smiled....""Then why didn't you-""Because you were smiling for him. And I would have had to have been an idiot to get in between that.
Mandy Hubbard
When I make love to you, Lanie, I want you to feel every inch of me buried deep inside of you, loving you, worshiping your body...
Flora Roberts
I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.
Betsy Lerner
[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.
Bill Clegg
The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory.
Noah Lukeman
Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.
John Brockman
But who bothers looking beyond the surface? Who even knows anything about Cinderella's Prince Charming - other than he's a handsome prince?
Mandy Hubbard
Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve.
Noah Lukeman
An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.
Sterling Lord
Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.
Noah Lukeman
The seeking of a mate shall be undertaken with due preparation and care. A life-bond should never be contemplated as a light thing--unlike a legal union or sanctified joining, the sealing of souls CANNOT be severed. When a mate is SOULBOUND to another--LIFEMATED, as some have come to regard it--a mystery is engaged. In one aspect mystical, the lifemating process is the most sublime endeavor that a Refarian may assume. Once formed, the bond must be ever cherished and nurtured by the process of lifelong rigor.
Deidre Knight
The Archbishop cradled his right hand in his left. He hung his head in concentration. The goal was meditation, but I've never been quite sure where meditation ends and prayer begins, or where prayer ends and meditation begins. I have heard it said that prayer is when we speak to God, and meditation is when God answers.
Douglas Abrams
Some trees love an ax, a drunk old-timer mumbled one night at the Tap, back when she still went there, and something in what he said rang true, but when she later remembered what he'd said, she disagreed and though instead that the tree gets used to the ax, which has nothing to do with love. It settles into being chipped away at, bit by bit, blade by blade, until it doesn't feel anything anymore, and then, because nothing else can happen, what's left crumbles to dust.
Bill Clegg
There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.
Noah Lukeman
What does an introvert do when he's left alone? He stays alone.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler
I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.
Betsy Lerner
When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.
Betsy Lerner
When you are grateful,' Brother Steindl-Rast explained, 'you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. The grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.
Douglas Carlton Abrams
Mr. Carter cleared his throat. “Soy sauce.” He deadpanned. “Really, Sera?
Flora Roberts
... you might have been born to work the land. But according to the fate you’ve made for yourself, you were meant to save it.
Eric Smith
I’ve never been one to go to church, but I’ve al was ways believed in a creative intelligence behind the ongoing riddle of the world.
Bill Clegg
It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.
Douglas Abrams
If I were you, I’d clear those cobwebs out because there isn’t a shop-vac out there strong enough to handle that job.
Flora Roberts
But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.
Betsy Lerner
Because cooks love the social aspect of food, cooking for one is intrinsically interesting. A good meal is like a present, and it can feel goofy, at best, to give yourself a present. On the other hand, there is something life affirming in taking the trouble to feed yourself well, or even decently. Cooking for yourself allows you to be strange or decadent or both. The chances of liking what you make are high, but if it winds up being disgusting, you can always throw it away and order a pizza; no one else will know. In the end, the experimentation, the impulsiveness, and the invention that such conditions allow for will probably make you a better cook.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler
Taking solitude in stride was a sign of strength and of a willingness to take care of myself. This meant - among other things - working productively, remembering to leave the house, and eating well. I thought about food all the time. I had a subscription to Gourmet and Food & Wine. Cooking for others had often been my way of offering care. So why, when I was alone, did I find myself trying to subsist on cereal and water? I'd need to learn to cook for one.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler
Rich or poor it’s nice to have money
Alan Sheinwald
Jennifer now understood the meaning of the cadence: the black and white drawing, the watercolor painting,and the notes. The cadence had at last developed into a concerto for violin, the instrument of gypsies, with a prevailing rhapsodic "leitmotif". The final movement had revealed itself when they were at the gypsy camp. And now it was complete.
Barbara Casey
The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned.
Bill Clegg
Hurry up, he'll be coming back pretty soon!"Lynda spelled with a "y" Corgill, who was two years behind Dara, Mackenzie, and Jennifer, and had just completed her sophomore year, squeezed the hot glue gun into the door lock of the headmaster's office. Shelby Andrews, her accomplice and the newest resident to be accepted at Wood Rose, stood watch."I see the lights of the truck. Hurry! He's coming back! Are you finished?"Lynda gave the metal apparatus one last squeeze, filling the lock with the quick-drying cement glue guaranteed to harden on contact. "Finished."In the soft illumination of the crescent moon high overhead, the two girls, barefooted and wearing dark blue pajamas, ran across the lawn crisscrossed by dark, elongated shadows and dampened by night-cooled air to the maintenance shed where they placed the glue gun on the top shelf where it was normally kept. With their task completed, they quickly returned to the dormitory, to the far end from where Ms. Larkins slept, and crawled through the open window. Within minutes they were back in their rooms, in their individual beds, and sound asleep. The sleep of innocent angels.It would soon be light; and Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women would start another day.
Barbara Casey
Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'.- M.F.K. Fisher "A Is for Dining Alone
Jenni Ferrari-Adler
There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.
Bill Clegg
You should really be more careful who you let put their hands on you.” A silky male voice hummed as hot, minty breath wafted around her ear and danced slowly across her nose. Sera inhaled deeply, her skin prickled with goose bumps.
Flora Roberts
A caress is better than a career.
Elizabeth Marbury
Lose control once in a while, and your emotions will make your strong. Keep your heart open, and they’ll make you invincible.
Eric Smith
No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.
Betsy Lerner
I'm going to make love to you, Lanie. I'm not your first, but I will be the last.
Flora Roberts
Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.
John Brockman
The richer your friends the more they will cost you.
Elizabeth Marbury