Elmore Leonard Quotes

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.

I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

I have no intention of becoming a shorthand author.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

Publishing is not my world.

Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.

Is rule of thumb in writing game: if story requires many long descriptions of smells so vile that will give reader nausea, is not likely to find publisher.

If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.

It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it.

Engrave this in your brain: EVERY WRITER GETS REJECTED. You will be no different.

A good editor is one of the sharpest tools a writer can have in her toolbox.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.