authorship challenges Quotes

When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.

Everyone thinks they can be a writer. Most people dont understand whats involved. The real writers persevere. The ones that dont either dont have enough fortitude and they probably wouldnt succeed anyway, or they fall in love with the glamour of writing as opposed to the writing of writing.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

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.

Here's a secret: fictive text doesn't necessarily flow easily. Most of the time it's more like cutting a highway through a mountain. You just have to keep working with your pick, chipping away at the rock, making slow progress.

I type even faster than I talk. I'm very proud of that. I type so fast. And I have to because the characters are living in real time and I've got to keep up with them. It's a miracle they even give me a royalty.

I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive.

Having books published is very destructive to writing.

The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.

The issue is that my book, and so many others, are not available for pre-order from Amazon. I hadn't realized how much that mattered for new authors. And how much Amazon is hurting us.

Frequently, an author gets "orphaned" at a publisher. What this means is that an editor buys their book, then ends up getting fired, promoted, or transferred to a different job somewhere else. It sucks for the author because suddenly the person who liked your book enough to buy it isn't around to help you edit and promote it.

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.