Michael Scott Quotes

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.

I've wanted to be an author as long as I can remember. English was always my favorite subject at school, so why I went on to do a degree in French is anyone's guess.

It never occurred to me when I was young that I could be an author. That would be like saying, "I want to be a movie star" or "I want to be a wizard." I didn't have any concept of what that path would look like. Maybe that's why I didn't publish my first book until I was 38.

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.

I want to be an author.

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.

I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.

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

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.

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.

I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

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.

I realized early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job. Because there are no pay grades and very little structure, people make interesting assumptions about the profession.

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

I'm not a dedicated writer in the sense of Stephen King.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

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

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.

I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.