Stephen King Quotes

By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.

I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'

If a young aspirant had a modicum of skill and a busy typewriter she or he would sooner or later get a foothold in one of the magazines and a leaping start on the ladder upward.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

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.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.

I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

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

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.

Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn't be publishing anyone at all after a while.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.