Quote of the Week

Characters live longer than people do. ‘Atomic Dog’ George Clinton, Still Radiating The Funk – You’ll need to listen to the audio. Which we totally recommend.

One of the issues at stake is the way Google presents the search results: They are shown graphically as a ragged-edged piece of paper, as if torn from a book. That angers the French publishers because it portrays their work as just one step away from the trash can, said Tessa Destais, a spokeswoman for La Martinière. “We know that Google is powerful, but they have to show some respect for books,” she said Monday. French publishers join Google booksearch lawsuit

“I was involved in designing the bottle and packaging. I don’t know about what’s in it. I barely cook, so what do I know about making perfume? It’s called a floriental and it’s for the mass market, not Bergdorf’s. For 25 years, I’ve been asked to put my name on a fragrance, and Anna Wintour made the match. I finally decided if it brings me some money, why not? Elizabeth Taylor makes fortunes with the stuff. And I’m doing more commercial things now. Coming out soon are DVDs of my books, starting with my first two.” (Danielle Steele to Cindy

How many of the new words captured in 2006 will achieve permanence is anyone’s guess: only a tiny percentage of words will ever gain entry into the Oxford English Dictionary and the waiting list of words is long. Catherine Tate’s ‘bovvered’ set to be included in Oxford dictionary

“For me the Web is like a teenager’s room,” Menaker [Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group] said. “It can be very messy, and you don’t quite know how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.” Booked-Up Publishers Could Be in a Bind

The task of flipping the book upside-down every eight pages is actually less tedious than it sounds. An outsider novelist goes, er, traditional: Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern cred is genuine, but so is his attention to the teenage heart in the new ‘Only Revolutions.’

Stand back for a war of words – and of commas, apostrophes and split infinitives. One of Britain’s leading language experts has attacked Lynne Truss’s bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves for its ‘misconceived’ and ‘deeply unnerving’ zero tolerance approach to punctuation. David Crystal, a former colleague of Truss who once advised her that a book about punctuation would never sell, condemns the author for joining the ranks of ‘linguistic fundamentalists’. He also criticises John Humphrys, the Radio 4 Today presenter, over his book championing the rules of grammar. Truss’s publisher has hit back, however, insisting language rules are vital in

“We’ve been much drunker than this,” he said, “but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security. Everybody was wearing jackets; there was classical music.We didn’t think anyone was going to steal our money.” He added: “Also, our office manager got into a fight with his girlfriend and had to leave the party, and he’s usually the guy who watches the cash box.” In the Haze of a Magazine’s Fund-Raiser, Someone Absconds With the Funds Raised

“I don’t know what they call ‘English’ now. I can understand the attractiveness of it. But I don’t hold the view that reading English is a soft option, or at least it shouldn’t be. It should be a severe option, restricted to those people who are qualified to do it. I’ve been out of touch with student life for a long time. But I don’t believe that many people nowadays get many visible benefits from studying English. It doesn’t do them any harm, of course.” The ideas interview: Frank Kermode: Britain’s foremost literary critic tells John Sutherland why the study

With the smash success of “The Da Vinci Code,” publishers have been increasingly attracted to entertaining fiction with a dollop of erudition. Holt Bets on Mystery Novel as a Fall Best Seller