Piers Anthony Quotes

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

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.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

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.

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

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

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.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.

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

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.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

I think it is worse [in 2015] for a mid-list author such as myself. You either have to sell like Stephen King or go with the small presses where there is no money. I was lucky to have been in the right place and time for many years.

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.

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.

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 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!'

The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble.

After starting as a journalist for newspapers and magazines, I began to write books and had success with a novel and four nonfiction books for young adults.