Stephen R. George Quotes

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.

I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out.

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.

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

I've been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don't think I would've had that kind of drive if I hadn't come out of the journalism business.

If I hadn't been able to get my first book published, I am not sure what I would have done.

I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.

Indie writers who promote their book instead of writing the next book are wasting their time. The more books you've written, the more books you'll sell. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

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

You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.

And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years.

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

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

'Fallen Too Far' was my first NYT bestseller. That changed my life.

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

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

I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.