Chris Pavone Quotes

A good part of the work is just reading a manuscript and coming to the office. I can't imagine wanting to even read an article about book publishing.

Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was a copy editor at Doubleday, and for a brief period, it was my job to help shepherd Pat Conroy's 'Beach Music' into the world.

I studied writing at university, and I actually majored in screenwriting. Then I went to work as a bookseller and then as a sales rep and publicist and then various editorial jobs until I ended up with HarperCollins in Australia.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.

After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press.

My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.

'Something Borrowed' was initially titled 'Rolling the Dice,' but my editor said it sounded like a men's gambling memoir.

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.

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

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

As I see it, my job has always been to champion the work of the authors I publish.

At Knopf, we look at each book on a case-by-case basis... in some cases, we think a writer might get a boost from an endorsement by a fellow writer, but in other cases, a new book will be better served by other means, such as publicity and reviews.

Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

I always had good recognition from the Southern writers, but the publishers never took any notice of that.

I have a novel out, 'Lupus Rex,' that I wrote and am excited about that.

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.

There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.