I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool ' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.

The cool thing about writing music writing anything is that once you publish it it's there forever.

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.

I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

I have several writer friends but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

In the first book of my Discworld series published more than 26 years ago I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

As an editor I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel 'The Lifeboat ' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night and I really wanted my company to publish it but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.