Seventies party boy turned all-powerful literary agent Andrew Wylie is perhaps the most despised and admired player in international book publishing. Known by insiders as “the jackal,” Wylie’s ruthless tactics for atttracting clients are nearly as famous as the six-figure deals he negotiates for his lucrative list of authors, who famously include Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Diane von Furstenberg, Al Gore and Bob Dylan. (Even his deceased clients are impressive: Wylie manages literary estates for Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Sontag and old pals Lou Reed and Andy Warhol.) An outspoken critic of mass-market fiction, Wylie’s open disdain for Amazon’s “megalomaniac” business strategy and the “Walmartizing” of bookselling makes Monday’s free keynote speech at IFOA an event not to miss.

In anticipation of his talk, here are some classic Wylie-isms:

On the future of publishing: “The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.” (The New Republic, 2013)

On Amazon: “Amazon is nothing more than a trucking company, a digital truck company…. These are not interesting people, their concept is uninteresting waste of time…. My advice is: if you have a choice between the plague and Amazon, pick the plague!” (Melville House, 2014)

On the London Book Fair: “The London Book Fair is a sort of squalid thing. The agents are in an agent center and it’s ghastly. Like being in a primary school in Lagos. It’s a bunch of agents sitting together at primary school tables.” (The New Republic, 2013)

On digital publishing: “We spend 96 percent of our time talking about four per cent of the business. That four per cent will climb slowly, and I think it will grow first for frontlist. I suspect that the trashier the book, the more likely it is to be converted to an ebook. You don’t have a desire to save James Patterson in your library. (Harvard Magazine, 2010)

On “chick-lit”: “There’s nothing there. It’s just a fad, like the hula hoop.” (The Guardian, 2003)

On personal-professional relationships: “There are a whole set of people in New York with whom I’ve done business for 20 years, who have no idea what our office is like. It amazes me. I think, I know this person’s private life, I know their fucking office, I know where they buy their SOCKS. And they don’t have ANY IDEA of who I am or where I come from.” (The Guardian, 2003)