Chris Pavone Quotes

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

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.

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.

I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'

I feel lucky I didn't become that newspaper cartoonist I wanted to be because in the U.S. so many newspapers have suffered circulation declines, and some have folded. What's fun about being an author is I reach a much bigger audience, and there is something special about launching a book you've penned.

The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

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.

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.

I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.

After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.

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.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

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

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.