Author Struggle Quotes

I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

Sarah Palin's book is big, 400 pages. She wrote the book herself and agonized over every word, and so will you.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don't like to read.

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

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.

Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

I find it hard to write in the first person.

I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.

The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

I'm not very good at depicting the characters' psychology on the page.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.