Julianna Baggott Quotes

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

The Muses inspire art and pretend not to notice when Mammon buys it.

The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

It's hard to make a living as a novelist. My first novel 'Tapping the Source' made quite a splash in Hollywood, and people started asking if I wanted to write scripts. I quickly realized I could make a lot more money that way.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.

I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.

Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skillful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets ...

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

The No. 1 thing is to write the book that you love and then hope that it finds an audience with the same taste as you. I think I've done that, and that's lucky.

I'm just happy to have some American readers - enough that it's a viable proposition for my books to appear there.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

There have been times - and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... - where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.

For a very long time, I thought everyone I met through the process of getting an agent and a publishing deal had made a mistake. When they agreed to pay me for the book, I thought they would ask me for the money back.