How to quote people in books

I’ve edited a bunch of manuscripts lately in which the authors handle quotes awkwardly. This is an easy problem to solve. I’ll explain how.

The first principle is this: direct quotes should reflect and amplify insights you’re including in the text.

• Do not use a quote to state a fact. If Company X had $3 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, just write the fact: “Company X had $3 billion in revenue in Q1, 2026.” It adds nothing to say “As the CEO of Company X stated, ‘Our company had $3 billion in revenue this quarter.'”
• There is no need to quote a source at length. If you conducted an interview, just pluck out the parts that help make your point. This is part of how you support readers: by finding the interesting things to quote. With a short quote, you provide the context. If you quote a speaker at length, the quote come from a different context, and you’ll need to explain that context, which is wasteful.

Here are four formats for quotes that work well. Notice that each quote amplifies a point made just before.

Introduce and identify the speaker, then give the direct quote

This is the usual “according to” format. For example (from my most recent book):

Other publishers are more hands-on. According to Richard Narramore, the executive editor at Wiley, “We do a lot of handholding and development, working on shaping the table of contents to push the reader’s buttons, working on key pains and gains. We don’t do this on every book, but on the majority of books, we give intensive feedback.”

This also works for quoting written material, “As Clayton Christensen wrote in Harvard Business, Review, ‘xxxx.'”

When quoting research studies, I usually include some qualification for the researchers, for example, “According to 2024 research by four academics at Stanford . . . “

Variants on “According to” include “As [speaker] explained to me,” “As [writer] blogged in 2023,” “Here’s what she told me when I asked here about it . . . “

Do the same, but with a briefer phrase

This works when you want to call attention to a specific word or phrase. For example:

Rohit Bhargava identifies trends — he calls himself a “non-obvious trend curator.”

Start with a sentence, then identify the speaker and continue

This works well when you want the sentence to make a point right away.

When [my wife Kimberley] heard me . . . tell someone that I was mostly retired, she told me I wasn’t. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re not retired. You are happier when you are working.”

Use a block quote to share’s someone’s words at length

Here’s an example from my book:

Limitless wasn’t just a bestseller. It touched a lot of lives. More than 200 people have given it five-star reviews on Amazon. Here’s an excerpt of a typical review, from SusanCW:

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Limitless, but I can tell you that it was exactly what I needed that I didn’t know I needed. I knew that I wanted to dig deeper into Limitless when I found what might be my favorite sentence in the whole book (also that I want to plaster everywhere so I can see it every day) on page 4, “I encourage you to stop giving votes to the people in your life who shouldn’t even have a voice.” Never did I think that a book would cause the significant pivot and perspective shift that it did.

This is easy, people

Conducting research is work. Putting quotes into text is easy.

1. Find the word or phrase that the speaker or writer used that illuminates your point exactly.
2. Use one of the four formats above to put the quote into your text.
3. Include a footnote if you’re quoting something published or posted before. If it’s based on a personal interview, you don’t need a footnote. You can say something like “As Mary explained to me, . . . “

There are lots of ways to add stylistic flair to your writing. How you quote people isn’t one of them. Let the quotes themselves light up the text, not the format you use to quote people.