Stephen McCauley Quotes

I spend about a year between novels.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

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

I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.

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.

I'm excited to bring my characters to life in book form.

This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'

I'm thinking my next book should be set on a tropical island, which will obviously require days, even weeks of meticulous research, but I'm prepared to make that sacrifice. That's just the sort of dedicated writer I am.

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

If I ever write a book, it will be called 'Bottle Blonde.'

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.

Never before had I been offered a contract and advance before a word had been written... I went home and began writing 'Julie of the Wolves.'

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

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.