Life & Wisdom Quote by Evan Hunter

There is a quiet, almost weaponized modesty in Hunter's line: it reads like a shrug, but it lands like an indictment. "I try to keep all my novels in print" frames authorship as stewardship, not vanity. The work exists, it found its readers once, and the writer's job is to keep the door unlocked. Then he pivots: "Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth". The politeness is the point. He doesn't call them philistines or bean-counters; he lets the understatement do the damage.

The subtext is a familiar fight in mid-century commercial publishing, where "in print" isn't a neutral status but a verdict: worthy books remain available; unworthy ones are allowed to vanish. Hunter, a prolific professional (and a writer who moved between literary fiction, crime, and screenwriting), is signaling how arbitrary that verdict can be. "Worth" becomes a contested currency with two exchange rates: the writer's sense of artistic and career continuity versus the publisher's calculus of sales velocity, backlist costs, and brand management.

It's also a sly comment on legacy. A book going out of print isn't just a business decision; it's a form of cultural erasure, a way the market edits the record after the fact. Hunter's humor works because it refuses melodrama. He makes the power imbalance legible in one dry sentence: authors can create a shelf of work, but publishers decide whether the public is allowed to see it.