Michael Gruber Quotes

I want to be an author.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

I realized early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job. Because there are no pay grades and very little structure, people make interesting assumptions about the profession.

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.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

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.

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.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

I don't want to be famous per se, but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

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

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I used to be an editor and I was editing young adult series. I didn't really like the books that I was reading, so I decided that I would write a book about something I'd want to read if I was 16. It turned into a Cinderella story... I developed a proposal and the characters of 'Gossip Girl' for my job.

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

It wasn't until after college that I started writing. I had just applied randomly for jobs in the media and got one on a magazine called 'Pensions World.' So I was writing for a living there and that's when I started my first book.

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 was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'