Neil Cross Quotes

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

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.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

There are so many good authors; there's no shortage of them.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

When I first started working on 'Staying Dead,' I got some well-meaning but negative feedback from industry folk because - back in 2001 - epic fantasy was still the big thing, alternate history a tight runner-up.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Publishing can be tough. It has the ability to kill dreams.

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 have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

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.

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.