David Crystal Quotes

I'm always surprised when large numbers of people buy my books.

I never set out to do this - getting to No. 1 in the 'New York Times' bestseller list wasn't even a pipedream.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.

Every author dreams of the kind of attention that 'Beautiful Children' has received in the press. Obviously, it's a shock whenever it happens. So yeah, I'm as surprised as everybody else.

I knew it was going to be enormous because of the number of people who bought the books, but, to be honest, I never thought it would be bigger than Bond. Never in a million years.

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.

I'm a writer. I never expected to be recognised on the street. I never expected to get that kind of coverage, good or bad. I never expected to sell as many books as I have.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

If you don't make the best-seller list, if you don't get shortlisted for any prizes, it's goodbye.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

I didn't make 'The New York Times' bestseller list until 'Charmed Thirds,' and then again for 'Fourth Comings.' It gave me a certain validation, and it certainly helps position me for future books, but it's not something I think about on a daily basis.

There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

As far as 'Windup Girl' becoming a hit - none of us expected that. 'Night Shade' was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn't sell, so all of our expectations were very low.

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.

Jerry and I hoped that it would be a popular bestseller.

This book, 'Stupid White Men,' has sold now over four million copies worldwide. Probably about half of that may be in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest, overseas.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.