John Sayles Quotes

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

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.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

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.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.

I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

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

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

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.'

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I urge aspiring writers to write three full-length novels before contemplating publication.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

I have only one bit of advice to the beginning writer: Be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

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