A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

There is a Swedish word, kulturbarer, which can be translated as 'culture-bearer' but still doesn't mean much. It's not a concept that has much American use, a…

Uncle Tom's Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People …

Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advan…

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Books written by actresses are for the birds. Besides what would I write?...that somebody was looking for an Italian type to play the ingenue in a film and I m…

[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It …