Mark Haddon Quotes

I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

My first book was a car crash. I tried to find all the copies and destroy them.

The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.

My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.

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

I wrote the worst novel ever.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

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

Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.

The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.

After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.

Writing that's not working for a living.

Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.

My first book was so horrible I have deleted all copies of it. Thankfully, it was before the Internet, so there are no lurking caches of it anywhere.

The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility.

Putting out a book is absolutely a lesson in vulnerability because it doesn't matter how much of an audience you have. Some people who have giant audiences can't sell books because those audiences don't feel like they need to give them their money.

It was something I never expected to - I never expected the book would sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door

Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold.