Sarah Rees Brennan Quotes

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

It is difficult to survive as an author in Sweden, so for commercial success, it is good idea to write crime, get yourself translated, and live happily ever after.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

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.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I always grew up with the idea that in order to be a successful writer, I should have a book published.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'

That's very nice if they want to publish you, but don't pay too much attention to it. It will toss you away. Just continue to write.

The poems were the only thing I wrote that was not for everyone else. Then my editors at Penguin, who were also friends and had seen several of them, aggressively urged me to do a book. Editors can be aggressive, especially after drinks. That's how 'Beyond This Dark House' appeared.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.

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.

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.

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

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.