James A. Michener Quotes

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

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

There are writers who go their whole lives and never hit that No. 1 spot.

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to find sensible men to read it.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I do what I love and what I always dreamed of doing for a living. I write love stories, and I have always had a publisher willing to publish them. I have a sizable and loyal audience. I have made best-seller lists and won awards. What more could anyone ask for?

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.

I didn't think [Ella Enchanted] would get published. Everything I'd written till then had been rejected. If it was published, I thought it might sell a few thousand copies and go out of print. I thought if I was lucky I could write more books and get them published, too. I still pinch myself over the way things have worked out.

Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don't even want to run, but, once running, can't help but not want to lose.

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

The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

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

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.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

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.

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

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

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

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