James Payn Quotes

Oh, I've become immune to the Booker. I think we need something a little more like the Pulitzer prize, where there isn't this great race.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting published and continue to write what I wanted to without compromising.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

Once 'Walk Two Moons' received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.

I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.

The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you're going to be in trouble. It's a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that's so unpredictable.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

My sixth book, 'A Breath of Snow and Ashes,' was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.

It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.

To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

I have faith that worthy but misunderstood or ignored books can still prevail - and when they do, fewer joys are as sweet - but authors have families to support and rent to pay, and for them, I hope for acclaim in their time rather than late-in-life or posthumously.

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

I'm probably one of the few authors in this country who could very comfortably live off my writing.

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

The running joke about the Premio Cervantes, the most coveted literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, which was established by Spain's Ministry of Culture in 1976, is that Cervantes himself wouldn't have received it. This is because he was, in his heart, the most anti-Spanish of Spanish writers.

Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.

My first novel was a critical success in a matter of weeks.

When Paul Beatty's 'The Sellout' was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release. It got a rave review in the daily 'New York Times' and one in the weekly 'New York Times Book Review,' too, for good measure. But by and large, it was not a conversation-generating book.