Sigrid Nunez Quotes

I guess I feel it's funny to be looked to for advice on writing when I am still taking in so much from other people.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.

Success? You can't get a big head about it. When people stare at me, they could be whispering to their friend, 'That guy sucks! Have you seen him before? He's horrible.'

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.

I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I'm not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don't want to come off egotistical.

I've had great writing teachers and mentors and great success with my first book.

The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him his is not.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.

I was no pope - I could not boast infallibility.

I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

I can't believe I actually wrote a book.

I'm not a writer. As for direction, I don't have the guts to do that. Still you can never say never.

There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

Consider that we shouldn't call our brother a fool, since we don't know ourselves what we are.

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on.

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

You been around enough to see that if you think you're it, you better check with me.