T. S. Eliot Quotes

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

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

Honestly, I feel pretty awed anytime I meet just about any writer. I get how hard it is to write and make a living from it, but there's also this almost magical force you need to tap into, and I'm amazed by anyone who can do it.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.

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.

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

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

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.

Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

I always wanted to be a writer... 'Critical Care' was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating 'Critical Care' for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I'd go back to it.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.

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.

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'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.

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.