Mark O'Donnell Quotes

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 I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

Dreamers become writers, and for me, being a published writer is a dream come true.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

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 never thought I would grow up writing a book.

I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.

I'm not going to pretend that I never fantasized about winning the Hugo. Or the Nebula, for that matter. I just never thought it was an actual real possibility.

I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

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

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

I've been the desperate writer before. I wrote a novel, and they paid me for it, and I've had those calls from my agent, and I'm like, 'Do you need me to ghost-write a vampire novel? What do you need? I'll do Transformers... tell me!'

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.