John Sandford Quotes

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.

I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.

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.

This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

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.

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore was offered to dozens of British publishers and was turned down by everyone. It is still on offer in the U.K., but I'm not confident there will be any takers.

It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.

Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

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.

I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.

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 got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

You work hard on a book and throw it out there and then it's beyond your control.

'Hardware' came about because I had written quite a few scripts and hadn't had any luck getting them made.

I don't get on with novelists, don't enjoy their company. Once you've worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it's not always pretty.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

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.

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.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.