Hakan Nesser Quotes

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

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

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

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

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

Literary life used to be quite different in Britain in the years I lived there, from 1971 to 1989, because money was not a factor - no one made very much except from U.S. sales and the occasional windfall.

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

All writing and publishing is very difficult, regardless of genre. There are going to be obstacles no matter what.

One good thing about leaving daily journalism was that I was no longer obliged to read all the book prize short lists.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.