Nicholas Sparks Quotes

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

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.'

Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

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 can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in 'Best Horror of the Year.'

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

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.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

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.

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

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.