Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Wolfe

Publishing looks like an industry built on expertise; Wolfe punctures that illusion with a novelist's blunt clarity. Calling it "mysterious" isn’t romantic mysticism so much as a jab at the machinery that pretends it can quantify taste. He’s describing an ecosystem where gatekeepers, reviewers, bookstore buyers, and readers all act like a weather system: patterns exist, but no one can guarantee the forecast. The line quietly rebukes the myth that success is a meritocratic outcome of talent plus hustle. In Wolfe’s framing, a book’s fate is less a verdict on its quality than a collision of timing, networks, and mood.

The second sentence sharpens the critique. "Hard to predict" is an indictment of the industry's confidence theater: the meetings, the comps, the seasonal catalogs that claim to know what "the market" wants. Wolfe is also defending authors against a uniquely modern humiliation: being told their work failed because they didn’t sell it hard enough. By insisting that "advertising seems to do very little good", he separates books from consumer products. You can’t reliably ad-spend someone into caring about a voice.

Context matters: Wolfe came up in the interwar publishing world, when mass media was expanding and publishers were professionalizing publicity, even as word-of-mouth and critical attention still made or broke careers. The quote reads like a veteran’s shrug and a warning: the business will always want to sound scientific, but literature travels through human contagion, not controllable campaigns.