Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

Anne Applebaum

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

A. N. Wilson

Age You Year

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

A. R. Ammons

Work Poetry Change

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

Aaron Swartz

Work Men Way

The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

Aaron Swartz

Age World Up

When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.

Adam Lashinsky

Age Year Vent

My first book was on the grittier side of life. A week before being published, I realized all of my main characters come from single households. That was something that, when I lived in South Bronx, that's what it was like.

Adam Silvera

Life Week Use

Having a book published whenever is a huge honor.

Adam Silvera

Whenever Shed She

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

Adrian McKinty

Well T Stories

I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.

Adrian Tomine

Work Ways Way

As an instructor at Alexandria University, I did research that was published in international journals. Although I left to pursue a doctorate in the United States, it was not for want of a good life.

Ahmed Zewail

Life Good Want

I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.

Ahmet Zappa

Writing Ways Way

When Edna O'Brien's first novel, 'The Country Girls,' was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that horrifying purpose.

Alan Cheuse

Family Age Yin

In the Pentagon Papers case, the government asserted in the Supreme Court that the publication of the material was a threat to national security. It turned out it was not a threat to U.S. security. But even if it had been, that doesn't mean that it couldn't be published.

Alan Dershowitz

Men Government Up

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

Alan Furst

Time Intelligence History

I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.

Alastair Reynolds

Wing Win T

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.

Aleister Crowley

God Age T

My mother used to take my brother and me to get any books we wanted, but they were second hand books published in the '30s and '40s. I liked scary books.

Alejandro Amenabar

Car Were Wanted

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.

Aleksandar Hemon

War Writer Write

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

Aleksandar Hemon

Art Writing While

In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.

Alexander Chee

I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.

Ali Liebegott

Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.

Ali Smith

The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.

Alice Meynell

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

Alice Meynell

'Royal Beatings' was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to 'The New Yorker' in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. 'The New Yorker' sent me nice notes, though - penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren't terribly encouraging.

Alice Munro

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Alice Walker

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

Alice Walker

'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history!

Alison Weir

'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.

Allan Gurganus

I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.

Alonzo Church

I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.

Amanda Burton

In 1861, Bachofen published his radical thesis that the Amazons were not a myth but a fact. In his view, humanity started out under the rule of womankind and only switched to patriarchy at the dawn of civilization.

Amanda Foreman

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Amartya Sen

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

Amish Tripathi

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Amitava Kumar

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

Amor Towles

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

Amor Towles

In the story I eventually called 'Archangel' and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier.

Andrea Barrett

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

Andrew Clements

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

Andrew O'Hagan

I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.

Andrew Sean Greer

Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.

Andrew Shaffer

The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.

Andrew Vachss

When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called 'The Childhood of Famous Americans.' In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.

Ann Hood

I got the writing bug in the fourth grade when a poem of mine was published in the school newspaper. Music criticism came a little later, when I was in high school.

Ann Powers

If you'd said to me when I was 21, 'You're going to get into parliament, be a senior minister of state, shadow health secretary, shadow home secretary, a privy councillor, be endorsed by the Times as a candidate for Speaker, have four novels published, and then have great fun after you retire,' I'd have said, 'That sounds like a good life.'

Ann Widdecombe

The idea of being published was such an abstract thing in the beginning. It wasn't even an option in my mind.

Anna Todd

'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

Annalee Newitz

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

Anne Applebaum