Padgett Powell Quotes

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

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.

I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.

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

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

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 know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.

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.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

Sweden is a small country, and a Swedish writer can barely make a living as an author. We were able to quit our jobs as journalists only after we had been translated into, among others, German.

I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

I want to write a best-selling book.

No one was interested in picking up a midlist series, even though I have a decent fanbase and respectable numbers.

While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.