P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I sometimes talk to people who think I got published because I was an editor, or because I was an agent, and I have to disabuse them of that notion. It wasn't because of my emplacement within the industry. Actually the writing came first, and the publishing came first as well.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

I started as a writer for magazines, and soon they asked me to illustrate my stories. I started from the bottom of the bottom. And I climbed the stairs, one by one.

After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

I actually was doing ghostwriting jobs since I was 17 years old, so I've been supporting myself off and on with writing jobs for almost 10 years. But those were all things that I did off the books. And now I do a lot more writing on the books.

The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book

[Margot Hentoff] was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.

I decided to make my living as a magazine writer. And I found that it was really easy and fun.

At the age of 10, I had my first piece published in what was known as the 'Junior Post,' which was part of the 'Yorkshire Post,' and it was just for kids. I read it every week. And I got paid for it. So I thought... 'I can actually do this. I can get paid to write, and this is going to be fine.' I wrote several pieces for them.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

There are plenty of paths to becoming a writer, but I think the most reliable ones involve total commitment: writing for magazines and newspapers, teaching writing, editing books, representing authors.

I had a column for the 'Seattle Weekly' for five years, and there was one column that was called 'How To Be A Man,' and it was kind of tongue in cheek; it was really tongue in cheek. And I got a book deal from that column.

At every writers' conference, you have the opportunity to hear from best-selling authors, top literary agents, and excellent editors who will demystify the publishing industry and give you great advice, no matter where you are in your writing career or what you're currently struggling with.

I had almost nothing published until I had something published in 'Sports Illustrated.' I started there as a fact-checker two weeks after I got out of college and was there for almost 20 years.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

I don't know what my friends do. Generally they become producers. That way they can stop writing!

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

I started out writing romance novels, and that's a side of publishing that's very female oriented. 99.9% of the writers are women, most of the editors are women, and these are books written for the female gaze. And so my point of view - the way I looked at fandom and publishing and writing - was all about women. So for me that's what was natural, that's what was comfortable. And then I moved over to comics. And all of a sudden it was... Pardon the expression, it was a sausage fest.

. I used to advise writers to just write their books and it will find a home, and suddenly that didn't seem as certain. I figured it was time to act. I considered a small press through RADAR, my literary non-profit.

At the very beginning, I was a page at Letterman, and I freelanced for any place that would let me write any word. I wanted to do this so badly.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.

I quit law in 1988 to start writing, and it took me 17 years from that point to get a book contract. I guess you can say I was on the slow train.