David Bergen Quotes

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

I want to write a best-selling book.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

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.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

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

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.