Andrew Vachss Quotes

The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being.

I write as a matter of need - seven books and God knows how many short stories before anyone published me.

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.

When you tell them you're a writer, they say, 'What have you written?' And then you've got to tell them what you've done. I don't ask a plumber what he does. Then I have to explain what I've done, and I haven't really, you know. I've just told some stories.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

It took me a long time to accept that I was a writer.

I never wanted to be a celebrity writer. I wanted to be a good writer. I'm still trying to be a good writer. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

I didn't want to write a book as Stephen King's son, because all I did was get born, and that's not much of an accomplishment. If that was the reason my book was published, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. I wanted to do my own thing.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

I've never thought of myself as a writer. I still don't, despite all the writing I've done.

Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.

There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.

I am not a born writer, but I was born a writer.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

When you're an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.

There’s only one difference between published and unpublished writers, and it is this -- the first group see their work in print on the shelves of Waterstone’s or Tesco or online at Amazon; the second group are yet to have physical evidence of the hours, weeks, years spent fashioning words into their patterns. You are already a writer.

We want you to stop caring about what anybody else's response is to you. And when you get there, they'll all really, really like you. It's the strangest thing. When you need their approval, you never get it. And when you don't need their approval, you're so tuned in, everybody wants to be with you.

I think my greatest insecurity would just be standing in the middle of the room and having everyone watching me thinking that's what I want. If I am interesting to you because of who I am, then that's incredible. But if I'm interesting to you only because of what I am, then let's not bother, you know?