Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.

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.

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

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.

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.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

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 process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.

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 didn't say I have to be a writer, but I did say that I needed to publish at least one book.

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 started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

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.

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.

I want to write a best-selling book.

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 I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

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