Rupi Kaur Quotes

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

I have been rejected 120 times, probably because I didn't write the right book.

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

I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.

My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

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.

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.

When I settled to writing seriously, which would be in my 30s, I did expect to be published eventually, but my aspirations weren't very high. A published book and a few appreciative readers was my idea of heaven.

In 2011, I did an internship in Seven Dials, a junction in London where seven roads come together. I'd given up on writing after multiple rejections for my first novel, and I was starting to consider a career in publishing instead, but Seven Dials gave me such a strong idea for a setting that I couldn't resist picking up my pen again.

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.

I struggled for a long time to get anything published.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

Send it to someone who can publish it. And if they won't publish it, send it to someone else who can publish it! And keep sending it! Of course, if no one will publish it, at that point you might want to think about doing something other than writing.

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

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.

I earned my writing stripes with a large man's shoebox overflowing with rejection slips... more than 100 before I got my first, 'Yes, we want this,' accompanied by a check.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.