Laurell K. Hamilton Quotes

I earned my writing stripes with a large man's shoebox overflowing with rejection slips... more than 100 before I got my first, 'Yes, we want this,' accompanied by a check.

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

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

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've been trying to write a book since before I was old enough to vote, and I've collected many rejection slips from publishers and magazines. I used to keep them all stuck to my refrigerator, with magnets, but an ex-girlfriend told me they were depressing, and defeatist, and suggested I take them down. A very wise suggestion on her part.

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

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

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 didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.

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.'

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

When I settled to writing seriously, which would be in my 30s, I did expect to be published eventually, but my aspirations weren't very high. A published book and a few appreciative readers was my idea of heaven.

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.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.

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.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.