James A. Michener Quotes

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

If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

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.

When you're a mid-list writer, it pays to write fast.

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for?

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life.

The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

With the success of 'Black Privilege,' of course, the book publishers wanted me to come with another book immediately. They came with the check, but I don't do things for money.

I never set out to be a published writer.

For me, social media isn't just about connecting with friends and sharing photos; it's a bigger, more tangled web that's led me to jobs working in television, speaking gigs around the country, and it's even helped me land my first book deal!

You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.

In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.

If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.

I love writing. I love to write, and I would eventually love to have some of my work produced.