Tad Williams: Things Go Away, Things Come Back

“The other reason my books tend to be long is that I have my own ideas about how you make people immerse themselves in an environment, and one of the ways is that you have to give the environment a certain amount of credibility in itself, and that means you have to spend a certain amount of time introducing it and acquainting people with it as you go along.”

Deborah Beale: The Arc of Life

“When I got into publishing, I had a brief period (thankfully) when I wanted to work with literary fiction. I read for Sonny Mehta when was the head of Pan, and when he was acquiring for the Picador list, and I quickly learned that not very good literary fiction is just really bad fiction, and that by contrast, I was really interested in stuff like young adult fiction and popular fiction. I was the lowliest of a number of editors working on So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, and that was a trip. It was actually the first Douglas Adams I’d read, and I literally fell out of my seat laughing, and then all these anxious sales people, plus Sonny, came to cross-examine me about how funny was it really, and was it truly going to work.”