Colson Whitehead Quotes

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

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

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

Well, to aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

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.

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 write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

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 think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

I urge aspiring writers to write three full-length novels before contemplating publication.

Every single path is so different, but I would definitely say that the idea of what a writer is or should be is not a thing anymore. Everyone is redefining publishing, writing, and storytelling in general.

There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.

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

I tend to write things and don't go the next step and try to get it published. I don't want to do book signings and stuff.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now.

Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

If I ever wrote a book, people would never believe it.