Ellen Datlow Quotes

Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.

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 started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I want to be an author.

My dad was an editor and a writer, and that's actually what I aspired to be.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.

I'm an author. And writers write books. And writing books is a full-time career.

Authors don't tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey's first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of 'B Is for Burglar.'

As I see it, my job has always been to champion the work of the authors I publish.

I have been writing since I was a kid and thought what I wrote down could one day be made into a book.

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.

In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

I'd always been a big reader, and I loved books, and I always thought writing would be a great way to get by in the world.

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

I had an agent who spent eight years - eight years! - trying to sell my stories. She sold other people's work; she just didn't sell mine.

I think back on that day when 16-year-old me scribbled on some silly piece of paper for some long-forgotten high school career-day project that my dream job was 'romance novelist.'

I became a children's author by accident.

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.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for?

I've been associated with Macmillan for over 45 years. I'd like to thank them for their continued commitment to my backlist and I look forward to continuing to work with them as they publish my next novel, 'Vicious Circle' in 2013.

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